HEADS AND TREES

Recovering Footprints: The Art of Dadang Christanto

Christine Clark

The Indonesian–Australian artist Dadang Christanto believes it is of paramount importance to recover and reclaim histories: hidden and manipulated histories, such as the Indonesian massacres of 1965–66,(1) which have caused immense human suffering and grief. Dadang has personally experienced how such events take place without leaving footprints on the pages of history while leaving a legacy of unimaginable and haunting memories: ‘At that time I was eight years old and living in a village. I did not understand about anything. In 1965, one morning, my father Tak Ek Tjiu was taken away in an army truck. The five of us children still were sleeping. Since then I have never seen my father again.’(2)

This experience sounds horrific, but more horrific was the Government’s ensuing manipulation of history and orchestrated campaign of public fear. The fear created was so great that, forty years after the event, the people largely remain mute and the stigma attached to this gruesome past forces the memories to be recollected in silence.

Having suffered this experience, and being an Indonesian of Chinese descent, Dadang has great empathy for the countless others who have suffered systematic violence and racial discrimination. His art responds to personal suffering, but Dadang eloquently imbues his work with multiple readings, inviting audiences to react on both universal and intensely personal levels. Dadang has a significant reputation internationally as well as in Indonesia, where he has had a strong influence on the direction of contemporary art practice. Since the early 1990s, his work has been widely shown internationally, receiving critical recognition for its exceptional power to transcend cultures and evoke reflections on universal human suffering and communal grief.

Even though Dadang’s earlier works can be interpreted as relating to Indonesian historical events, it is only since living in Australia for some time that he has felt the courage and strength to speak of his traumatic personal history: ‘I gradually realised after all those years I was free from social stigma. I wasn’t branded. I began to grow strong for giving evidence about these events.’(3) At this time, in 1999, Dadang began the Count Project, a series of drawings, paintings, sculptures and installations depicting single or multiple dismembered heads.

Dadang’s recent work continues the Count Project. These works maintain strong connections with Indonesia but increasingly respond to ever-present global turmoil. The artist speaks of the injustices suffered by the voiceless many by drawing repeatedly nonspecific dismembered heads. Through this process, Dadang provides a presence for the absences in officially sanctioned history and personal memory. Personally, it provides him with a cathartic meditative means to heal wounds and place his father in history.

Dadang depicts the victims in his latest Count Project works with streams of red, white or black surging from the Third Eye, the eye of wisdom. These pools of colour represent injury but also memory; the memory of the injustices these souls bear. He restricts his palette to red, black and white – a metaphoric reference to the colours associated with former President Soeharto’s New Order regime, where red was described as the wounds and black as the obscurity of history. Through the continual use of Joss paper, Dadang also makes reference to his Chinese identity and the discrimination and persecution that ethnic Chinese have historically faced in Indonesia. Prayer paper is associated with Chinese culture as it is customarily used in Buddhist ceremonies as an offering to ancestral spirits. Although graphically confronting, his use of prayer paper, along with the stillness of the heads and memorial-like quality created through repetition, affords these works powerful ethereal qualities.

In the words of revered Indonesian novelist, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, ‘I think history is important. It is a house from which people go out to travel the world. If they don’t know where they came from, they won’t understand their destiny.’(4) Dadang asks his audiences to question the reality of history. In doing so, he offers them the motivation to reclaim hidden memories with the hope of healing social and personal wounds and engendering faith in the future.

(1) It is estimated that between 100,000 and two million people were massacred in Indonesia from October 1965 to March 1966. The most common estimate of the death toll is 500,000. The Indonesian army and associated civilian militia groups wiped out a large number of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), as well as supposed communists and others.
(2) Dadang Christanto, interview with the author, 1 June 2003
(3) Dadang Christanto, interview with the author, 15 September 2004. Throughout Soeharto’s New Order Regime relatives of massacre victims were stigmatised in society. Their connection with the 1965–66 massacre victims was even printed on their identity cards.
(4) Pramoedya Ananta Toer, quoted in Gerry van Klinken, Power truth and memory: The battle for Indonesian history after Suharto, 1999, http://www.geocities,com/HotSprings/9085/powerhtm (25 February 2005).

Christine Clark is a freelance curator and arts manager with a continuing
involvement in contemporary Indonesian art.