Semsar Siahaan: Hero into exile (2000)
With Suharto gone, Indonesia’s most outrageous anti-Suharto artist chooses exile. Why?
artdesigncafé | café library | Published 24 January 2012
This article was previously published in Inside Indonesia, 62, April - June 2000.
Born in blood by the authority of guns, the New Order’s preferred art was sweetly decorative and/or abstract-spiritual. Fine art genres in themselves, they were also seen as politically toothless, thus “safe” to a regime which in terms of citizens’ rights could bear no scrutiny. However, the injustices of Suharto’s New Order, in combination with its ultra-conservative art establishment, ensured the return of politically engaged art by activist painters and poets. Beginning after a ten-year hiatus following the decimations of the 1965 massacres, this gradual return ensured a tenuous existence for engaged art from the late 1970s onwards.
By the early 1990s, the upsurge in Indonesian artists’ interest in installation art coincided with a broader interest in political dimensions to art, to the point where the two combined to become a “must” for artists desiring international visibility. From now on, politically engaged art bore the two faces of fashion and serious concern. No doubt, the last two years have conscientised larger numbers of artists than at any time in the last thirty-two years. At the same time, the intense uncertainty and hardship of this time of transition has led to some surprising changes for artists, which reflect the larger confusion: after the tyrant is gone, what does one put in his place?
Semsar Siahaan, now in his late 40s, was on the art-activist barricades from the late 1970s, one of the most outraged and outrageous of them all. While others limited their critiques of Indonesia’s establishment aesthetics and internal colonialisms to their art and private conversations, Semsar went several steps further. He made the news by burning one of his art teacher’s sculptures, Sunaryo’s West Irian in torso, at the Bandung Art Academy (ITB) in 1981. This avowed “cremation” led to Semsar’s expulsion from the school. The event launched him as someone who placed the private completely within the political realm and who felt that any means were valid, as long as his point was made, and made the public think. The last twelve years, Semsar has received significant attention at home, in Japan and in Australia, with his large, even monumental canvases that depict the struggle of the people against the greed and hypocrisy of the business and political elites, ever witnessing and holding up to view events that could not be discussed freely.
So how can it be that, today, with Suharto gone and a new Indonesia in the pangs of being birthed, and after twenty-odd years of fighting, Semsar Siahaan has chosen to go into exile? And not to a country with any Indonesian resistance in exile, like Germany, Australia, Holland, or even the USA— but to Canada?
Semsar Siahaan is not the only one who has left Indonesia in the last few years. Several activist artists have left for shorter or longer stays abroad. The mental toll of going against the dominant grain of their nation year after year, with the apparatus of control reaching right into their homes, is heavy. But none has sought permanent domicile elsewhere. Of all people, Semsar has.
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