Dadang Christanto: Trauma and Amnesia

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ART DADANG CHRISTANTO SOLO EXHIBITON

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Trauma and Amnesia Dadang Christanto Exhibition: Remembering Silence

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EGIME change is violent. There are several ways of dealing with this violent genesis: glorification (for example, Indonesia’s independence war of 1945-1949); amnesia (19651966 and perhaps also 1998); and glorification of the new regime’s genesis and condemnation of the previous one. However, individual lives lost are collateral damage in regime change, crushed by the proverbial weight of history, even though, this goes against moral intuition. Can private trauma still become a call for humanity and public justice? To murder randomly in great numbers and enforce to disregard—to forego civic re-

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membering—is to install public fear, which silences the possibility of politics. And this kept Suharto’s New Order regime in power for over three decades: the depoliticization of society by instilling fear. The violent genesis of the New Order regime was coupled with enforced public amnesia, which installed fear in society and fear made political action hazardous. No one knows how many were murdered in Indonesia during the tumultuous years between 1965 and1966, let alone where the graves are located to pay our respects. Even today, this is not knowledge that will be unearthed any time soon. And with all the lives lost, ideas became suspect as well. The denial of the magnitude of the mass kill-

ings, of ideas, of reality, of private trauma and the possibility of public memory created the fear the New Order used to maintain its power. George Orwell shows in his novel 1984 that such state-sponsored fear infects language as well. Language becomes a form of violence to distort reality (philosopher Judith Shklar calls this the ‘cognitive nightmare’ element in 1984; see also Benedict Anderson’s Language and Power). And who controls language, controls public memory, which can conflict with private memories of personal trauma. The language needed to express and make public the memories was erased and forgotten. Does that make us complicit? The arts have always been vital to public memory: monuments and statues glorifying or commemorating the (violent) past attest to that. While these monuments and statues have a public function, often, however, they are too static to do justice to our past, especially the individual traumas.

PHOTOS: YUZ MUSEUM DOC.

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