‘Breakin’ the Wall’: From street art to art space

Tree monster: Toy robots made of plastic waste have been placed under a banyan tree in Theater Jakarta’s open space as part of an installation by Atap Alis Community.

If you make street artists who normally thrive on creating art on a deserted overpass without getting caught by authorities work in the comfort of a contained art theater’s open area, do their creations loose the free spirit of street art?

Differing opinions emerged during a press conference held last week before the opening of Jakarta Arts Council’s (DKJ) visual arts exhibition “Breakin’ the Wall: The Street Art Show”.

Curator Bambang Asrini Widjanarko invited six street art communities to exhibit their works in the form of murals, art installations, 3-D illusion paintings, and balloons at the open space of the Theater Jakarta at Taman Ismail Marzuki.

The exhibition, part of DKJ’s December program titled “Diluted Boundaries, Managing Diversity”, runs from Dec. 8 to 18.

Art community Popo and Kampung Segart created a mural criticizing the appalling quality of sinetron (soap opera) on local television. Trio Lintas Mentawai paid a tribute to the late Mount Merapi gatekeeper Mbah Maridjan by drawing a 3-D illusionist painting of a buff Mbah Maridjan falling into a burning crater.

Jakarta Art Institute’s Action Painting created a 3-D illusionist painting of imprisoned tax officer Gayus Tambunan as Santa Claus. Atap Alis, headed by Baja Panggabean, recruited children to create an art installation that serves as a political parody. Art collective Xserut also created a 3-D painting of an underground Indonesian city and Amel and friends put together a balloon installation.

In his introductory piece to the exhibition, Bambang wrote that the theme was “intended to help understand street art as an alternative attitude when choosing new possibilities for independently growing forms or art and their diverse realization on the street”.

During the press conference, he said street artists had gained acceptance in mainstream galleries around the world.

“There’s no distinction between high and low art anymore,” he said.

Word play: The words “Tiada rotan Raam Punjabi” are painted under the nose of a picture of a man. Popo and Kampung Segart are playing with the Indonesian proverb “Tiada rotan akar pun jadi”, to represent the overwhelming presence of sinetron tycoon Raam Punjabi.

The theme “Breakin’ the Wall” signals the fluidity of visual art, he said.

“Everything is fluid now. Visual arts owes much to literature and theater. ‘Breaking Art’ also shows the use of other mediums than walls,” he said.

However, art critique Yusuf Hadi Susilo Hartono, editor in chief of Visual Arts magazine, was not convinced the works presented displayed the free spirit of street art. It was, he said, a “tamed” version of street art.

“There is no tension from being chased [by authorities]. It’s far from the spirit of street art,” he said, adding it was “cold”.

Art writer from Surabaya Henri Nurcahyo noted the context of the art works was missing. “Art is a combination of text and context. If you take street away from street art then the context is lost,” he said.

He suggested bringing context to the street artworks by displaying information about the locations of the artists’ work in the street.

Bambang, however, disagreed. He argued many street artists’ works around the world had entered galleries, museums, and auction houses. There is no clear definition of what and how the ideal artists and street art works are supposed to be, he added.

“And soon, the notion of resistance against everything established and the spirit of removing the boundaries between high art and low art may gradually be considered obsolete.”

Ryan Popo, the founder of Popo and Kampung Segart, said creating art in the street and in the Theater Jakarta was definitely different. “Tamed is the right word,” he said.

“It’s wilder in the street,” he said. “Here, the feel is different.”

Popo, who creates murals at Jl. TB Simatupang among other locations, said that in the street, a honk of a car, a sound of someone talking can set them on edge.

“Here, we can chat and have coffee and buy some time,” he said.

“There is also more negotiation in the process,” he said.

Despite the differing opinions, the works displayed at Theater Jakarta still hold power in humor.

Popo’s works for example consists of portraits of people with words written across their faces criticizing Indonesia’s sinetron.

The Indonesian proverb “Tiada rotan akar pun jadi”, which means be resourceful and use anything around you, was twisted into “Tiada rotan Raam Punjabi”, referring to Indonesia’s sinetron mogul.

Lintas Melawai’s work was darker as they painted a bare-chested Mbah Maridjan with the body of Hercules falling into a crater.

Larger than life: Members of Lintas Melawai stand on the 3D illusionist painting titled In Maridjan We Trust.

“Mbah Maridjan is someone who held much responsibility,” Sukadi Prabhu Suti said. “That’s why we painted him in the body of Hercules,” he said. “He is someone who was pious but also held on to Javanese traditions,” he said.

Atap Alis, an artist collective that opened a learning studio for children, worked with children to create toys from waste. They place the toys under a banyan tree as a political parody of the sign of Golkar, the political party that ruled during the New Order regime.

Head of DKJ Firman Ichsan said that this month’s theme on managing diversity aimed to increase people’s awareness of the plurality of Indonesian society.

“There are many clashes because diversity is not appreciated,” he said. “Our goal is to show people that difference is not a threat,” he said.
— Photos By JP/Prodita Sabarini

Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Feature | Tue, December 14 2010

‘Prison and Paradise’: How terrorism affects children

Searching for clues: Police inspect one of the restaurants that suffered the worst impact of the 2002 Bali bombings in Kuta. JP

Documentary filmmaker Daniel Rudi Haryanto cited verses of Koran sura Al-Ma’un: “Do you see one who denies the judgment to come?

“Then such is he who repulses the orphan with harshness, and does not encourage the feeding of the indigent. Woe to the worshippers who are neglectful in their prayers, those who want to be seen with worshipping men but refuse to supply their neighborly needs.”

The activist, who has studied Islam since his teenage years, was bewildered by the terrorist bombings in Indonesia.

“Islam says that we should not repulse the orphans, but the terrorists with their bombings are actually creating orphans,” he said.

His debut feature-length documentary, Prison and Paradise, tackles that particular problem. His
film, which will premiere at the 2010 Dubai Film Festival on Dec. 12, tells the story of the wives and the children of convicted terrorists and a victim of the first Bali bombing.

The 93-minute film, shortlisted for a documentary award at the festival, also shows the director’s 2003 interviews with executed Bali bombers Imam Samudra, Amrozi and Ali Gufron.

The 33-year-old, popularly called Rudi, said that he was overjoyed his film had been shortlisted, adding that he was proud to represent Indonesia on the international stage.

The documentary spans 7 years, starting with the interviews of the bombers at Nusakambangan prison.

In 2004, Rudi met with Noor Huda Ismail, a Jamaah Islamiyah analyst and an alumna of the Ngruki islamic boarding school where many of the terrorist convicts went.

Rudi then documented Huda’s encounters with Mubarok, his former roommate at Ngruki who
went on to join the radical movement. Rudi and Huda met with the family of imprisoned terrorist convicts Ali Imron and Mubarok and the family of bomb victim Imawan Sardjono in 2007. In 2010, he conducted more interviews with the families.

He said the documentary aimed to show the consequences of terrorism on the lives of children.

The sons of Imawan Sardjono, Alif and Aldi, were infants when their father died due to the bombing. “The children became fatherless due to the first Bali bombing that was carried out in the name of Islamic jihad. In fact the family of Haji Maksum [Imawan’s father in-law] and Aldi and Alif’s father were Islamic activists in Dalung Permai village in Denpasar. They worked together to establish a Koran school in their kampung,” Rudi said.

“The family became victims and suffered,” Rudi said. “The children had to grow up without a father.”

Meanwhile, the children of terrorist convicts also suffered from the acts of their fathers. In his documentary, Rudi followed the wives and children of terrorist convicts Mubarok and Ali Imron, documenting the families’ visits to Jakarta to meet the two men. The children of Mubarok and Ali Imron were the same age as Aldi and Alif.

“Ali Imron and Mubarok were sentenced to life in prison. Ali Imron and Mubarok’s children are now living under the stigma of terrorism, moving from one place to another,” he said.

The children think that their fathers were studying in Jakarta. “This is another problem. One day they will have to find out the truth and it will definitely affect their lives,” Rudi said. Even now, one of the children has asked whether her father is in prison and not in school, he said.

In the film, Rudi’s interview with Ali Imron, who was in charge of finding bomb-making materials, showed how the indoctrination of the radical movement has made Ali Imron neglect the care of his family’s well being.

“I didn’t look after my wife when she was pregnant,” says Ali Imron in one interview. “Both my children were born without me,” he said.

In another interview, Amrozy said that he simply asked God to mind his children.

Rudy said that he was eager to show his documentary film in Islamic boarding schools and cultural centers. “Our aim is to enable reconciliation,” he said.

Huda, whose foundation, the Institute of International Peace, funded the documentary, said there were still many Muslims who were in denial about the terrorist attacks, believing that groups outside of Indonesia did it.

“With this documentary, people have to admit that we have homegrown problems.”

Rudi said his next documentary would be on the lives of ex-combatants who have repented. Under a program with Prasasti Perdamaian, ex-combatants in Semarang are now running small food stalls
selling “torpedoes” — a dish made of goat’s penis.

“It’s very interesting,” Rudi said. “A food stall is a good place for reconciliation process because
here, their mind-set about society and jihad, which they see in a violent context, can be transformed,” he said.

“In a food stall, if they have customers that are Caucasian or Chinese, they still have to serve them.

This broadens their social interactions,” he said. “It’s a place where they learn to interact with society,” he said.

Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Feature | Mon, November 29 2010

James Yuill: On his own, immersed in electronic melancholia

A new genre: London-based electronic musician James Yuill plays at the Indoor Tennis complex in Senayan, last Friday.

There is something riveting about electronic music. The visceral beats, the layers of sound, the buildup to a stop and a shattering climax — to return the same cycle. A bit like real life.

London-based electronic musician James Yuill takes these hypnotizing sounds to a new level. He carries melancholia through subdued acoustic guitar and emotional lyrics. Blending folk and electronic music, the one-man-band has created a unique sound that will move one to both dance and cry.

The 29-year-old joined Melbourne band The Temper Trap last weekend on its Indonesian tour to Bali, Jakarta and Bandung.

Yuill tends to perform on his own, with his guitar, turntable, synthesizer and laptop, and sings about being alone in On Your Own. With his soft voice, he sings about sorrow: I stand there with nothing but blood in my veins/needlessly washing away the refrain again. His fingers go from gently strumming guitar chords to playing the synthesizer for samples of beats and blips.

Influenced by the indie-folk legend Nick Drake and techno virtuosos such as Aphex Twins and Chemical Brothers, Yuill has successfully combined different genres into something the London music scene dubs as “folktronica”.

His beats can do two things. They will either heighten the pain from the emotional words and
folksy tunes — burning your heart with melancholia — or mask it as something harmless, letting the
sorrow subconsciously seep into the back of your mind while dance takes over.

At a press briefing Friday, the blonde bespectacled man said he did not consciously decide to merge the two different styles of music. “It just felt natural at the time,” he said.

Yuill recorded his first album Vanilla Disc in 2005. “When I was recording I started to layer all of different things on top and kind of messed around with electronics.

“After touring for four years, as I learned to use the software and control things live, my music took on a harder dance edge,” he said. Yuill released his latest album Movement in A Storm this year under the Moshi Moshi record label.

Friday’s performance showed a tall Yuill lost in his music, bouncing his knees to the beat. He played tunes from his latest album, singing My Fears, a tender song that shows both strength and vulnerability.

Amidst looping beats, Yuill drawled the words: separate the me inside of you/my fears will get me through. The ballad Foreign Shore is dark and bittersweet, with Yuill warning a woman about a man that’s: “Known/known by law/to be a traitor from a foreign shore.”

Carrying his camera, Yuill took pictures and videotaped the audience saying hi to the camera. He mentioned he would be selling his merchandise and signing autographs in the next tent after his performance.

When a woman in the crowd gave an exulted cry, he cheerfully said: “Whoa! Extreme reaction over there!” then quickly added in a self-deprecating way: “I wish I got that [reaction] at home.”

— JP/Prodita Sabarini

The Jakarta Post | Entertainment | Fri, November 19 2010

HIV-positive women resent sterilization advice

Sharing a nice moment: D’Tri (left), Miss Indonesia’s finalist from Jakarta, and Inka, another Miss Indonesia finalist from East Kalimantan, talk to Asti and Yuli, two women with HIV/AIDS who are undergoing treatment at the Darmais Hospital in Jakarta. JP/J.ADIGUNA

Her eyes welled up at the thought of her late husband who died four months ago. At 25, Cahaya is a single mother who runs a small store in front of her parent’s house in Jakarta.

She is uncertain about her future. She said she was not sure whether she would find another man in the future who would ease her lonely struggle.

The small-framed woman is HIV positive. But no one in her family knows she is, she said. “It was just between my husband and I. We used to be able to talk about it together.”

After giving birth to her second child two years ago, a doctor in a central hospital in Jakarta advised her to undergo a sterilization procedure because she is HIV positive. And so she did.

“The doctors said that I should be sterilized because my husband and I were both [HIV] positive,” Cahaya said, despite the existence of the PMTCT (Preventing Mother-to-Child Transmission) program that enables mothers to give birth to children without transmitting the virus to their child.

Cahaya, a homemaker before her husband died, contracted HIV from her husband. She did not know he was a former drug user when she married him. A month after they tied the knot, she fell pregnant. Nine months after the birth of her first child, the baby died of severe diarrhea. The doctor told her to get her blood tested. She found out she was HIV positive.

During her second pregnancy, Cahaya followed the PMTCT program, taking Anti Retrovirals (ARV) and undergoing a C-section, which was free under a government and National Aids Commission program. Her two-year-old daughter is healthy and HIV negative.

“We were concerned the hospital would make it hard for us to access the PMTCT program if we did not agree to the sterilization,” she said.

Two months ago, Cahaya met a fellow HIV-positive patient at the hospital when she was about to get her ARV.

The woman had just given birth to a baby and Cahaya asked whether she had been sterilized. “She said she hadn’t. I was so shocked. Why did the doctor tell me I had to be sterilized?” she said.

“I still have a long future ahead of me. If I meet someone, he will probably want to have children,” she said. “I am even thinking I might stay alone for the rest of my life and not remarry.”

Despite the implementation of PMTCT program some doctors in Indonesia are still advising HIV positive women to get sterilized. Oldri Shearli from the Indonesia Alliance of Positive Women (IPPI) said patients and doctors’ lack of awareness about women’s reproductive rights is the main problem.

There were 21,770 reported cases of HIV and AIDS in 2010, according to Health Ministry Data.

Around 25 percent of the people affected are women. More than 70 percent of HIV-positive women are in their reproductive age. The rate of mother-to-child transmission in 2010 is 2.9 percent.

The most common way HIV is transmitted is through sexual relations between heterosexuals (50 percent). HIV can also be transmitted by sharing needles or injection equipment with an injection drug user who is HIV-positive (40 percent), and 3.3 percent of HIV cases are transmitted through men having sex with each other.

Head of the National Aids Commission Nafsiah Mboi said doctors should no longer be advising HIV-patients to be sterilized.

Oldri said when HIV and AIDS had just entered Indonesia and the services for ARV treatment were not yet in place, doctors were advising HIV patients to get sterilized to prevent mother-to-child transmission of the disease. But with the publication of PMTCT guidelines from the World Health Organization, doctors should have stopped giving such advice by now.

Nafsiah said current studies have shown that normal delivery was recommended for HIV positive women who have undergone an ARV regime. “Unless there are signs the mother’s health is poor,” she added.

However doctors are still using their authority to advise HIV-positive women to be sterilized, not only in Jakarta, but also in Bandung and Bali.

In Bali, the Sprit Paramacitta Foundation, an organization focusing on HIV and AIDS issues, stumbled upon a woman whose pregnancy was terminated and who was sterilized.

At the time, the foundation was carrying out a survey on the PMTCT program in Bali. During a focus group discussion, a woman became emotional and told her story about her abortion and sterilization.

“Hani” was pregnant in 2007 and was distraught because her husband was having an affair with another woman while she was pregnant with his child.

The doctor suggested she abort her child and be sterilized, because she was HIV positive and already had two children.

“She was given a form to sign stating she agreed to be sterilized. She said she was so distraught at that time that she signed without really realizing what was happening,” Spirit Paramacitta director Putu Utami said.

The hospital representative told the foundation the doctors did so with the best intentions. “They said they wanted to prevent more children being born with HIV,” she said.

Her organization recommended the hospital inform its patients of all the choices available to them, and make sure their patients were in a stable emotional state when they made a decision.

Cahaya feels her rights as a woman to make informed choices about her body were violated. Instead of asking her opinion on getting sterilized, doctors talked to her husband.

“I was being examined and we were setting a date for the C-section.”

The doctor then called her husband to talk in private and told him Cahaya should be sterilized because they were both HIV positive.

Her husband was concerned they would face difficulties accessing the PMTCT help so he signed the consent form without her in the room.

“Later, I was summoned and they explained it to me,” she said. “My husband had already signed the papers.” While the doctor talked to Cahaya’s husband a week before the labor, “Diana”, in Bandung, said the doctors had only asked her husband to sign the consent form when she was about to give birth.

She said the doctors had suggested she should get an abortion at first. “The doctor said I had a moral obligation because I am HIV positive.”

Andi Yentriyani from the National Commission on Violence against Women (Komnas Perempuan) said the doctor’s advice to get sterilized could be considered as violence against women.

“This can be considered as violence when the information given is not complete and is conveyed in a way that scares people or makes them feel intimated, which in the end result in the loss of the feeling of safety,” she said.

“Everyone has the right to complete information so they can make an informed decision and be responsible for their decision. Every doctor should carry out that responsibility,” she said.

Nafsiah said doctors should be informed about PMTCT guidelines through the health ministry and professional associations.

The Health Ministry’s director general for disease control and environmental health, Tjandra Yoga Aditama, said there were no regulations stating doctors had to advise HIV positive women to be sterilized.

“The government guarantees that all programs related to HIV and AIDS are accessible for free,” he said.

Tjandra added that the government continued to inform the general public and doctors on how to handle HIV and AIDS cases.

“For example, there is a meeting today at Sulianti Saroso Hospital about HIV. Hundreds of doctors are attending. This is an effort to continuously inform doctors about the issue,” he said.

Cahaya hopes women in the future will never have to endure her ordeal. “Don’t force women to be sterilized. Women have the right to have a family, children and grand children,” she said with a quivering voice.

Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Feature | Wed, November 10 2010

Tash Aw: Mapping invisible worlds

Malaysian author Tash Aw grew up knowing Indonesia was his country’s closest and most influential neighbor. But when he moved to England for college, he found there was little mention of Indonesia in the Western world.

“It was virtually invisible,” Aw said. This inspired him to title his second novel, set in 1960s Indonesia and Malaysia, Map of the Invisible World. “This was my way of drawing attention to Indonesia, of mapping it,” Aw wrote in an email recently.

Aw’s debut novel, The Harmony Silk Factory, won the Whitbread Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Novel in 2005, and was longlisted for the MAN Booker Prize. Set in 1940s Malaya, The Harmony Silk Factory has become an important voice in telling a Southeast Asian story to an English-speaking audience. With his 2009 Map of the Invisible World, Aw returns to Southeast Asia, this time further south to Indonesia.

Map of the Invisible World tells the story of two orphaned brothers. A wealthy Kuala Lumpur couple adopts the older brother, Johan, while the younger, Adam, is adopted by a Dutch-Indonesian man. The story begins on an island east of Bali, where Adam witnesses Karl, his adopted father, being arrested by the army during the time of Sukarno’s anti-imperialist rhetoric. Adam is an orphan once again, and journeys to Jakarta, meeting Karl’s former flame, Margaret, a university lecturer, and her assistant Din, who entices Adam to join in revolutionary struggle.

The title of the novel recalls the plight of its main characters, Aw says. “All the characters in the novel are physically present in one place, but their emotional lives are caught in another place, another time — in another world that has ceased to exist, or which may never have existed, a world that is now invisible,” he said.

Aw’s characters view home as an abstract and fragile thing. He may have drawn this from his own life experience, of finding a home in another country while continuing to view Malaysia as home. Aw writes about Adam’s view of home: “In those days he did not yet understand that Home was not necessarily where you were born, or even where you grew up, but something else entirely, something fragile that could exist anywhere in the world.”

Aw moved to England when he was 19, to study law at Warwick University and Cambridge University. He stayed in England, working as a lawyer for several years while working on his writing — a childhood ambition. Aw completed a degree in Creative Writing in 2002 at the University of East Anglia.

Asked where his home is, Aw’s reply was: “Home — that is the million dollar question for me!”
Aw says he owns an apartment in London, which makes London technically his home. “But I spend a lot of time in Kuala Lumpur and the rest of Southeast Asia. I think Malaysia will always be my point
of reference.”

Aw’s story of two brothers setting off on different paths is also a metaphor for how Aw views Indonesia and Malaysia.

“The two countries were often thought of as ‘brothers’ — with a shared language and religion and set apart from the other non-Muslim countries in Southeast Asia. We share music, TV and film. But it also struck me that in many fundamental ways the two countries could not be more different, both in terms of history and everyday contemporary life,” Aw says.

“So I decided to write a novel about two brothers and two countries, whose differences were most clearly highlighted in the 1960s during the time of Konfrontasi. The 1960s were a very turbulent time for Southeast Asian countries, most notably Indonesia, which is why it seemed the natural starting point for the novel.”

Aw has traveled extensively in Indonesia, including to Lombok. Last month, Aw took part in the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali.

Aw recognizes the love-hate relationship between Indonesia and Malaysia. The two countries have had bumpy relations, starting with Konfrontasi when Sukarno waged a war against Malaysia under the pretext that the latter was a neo-imperialist puppet.

In recent years, more spats have occurred because of misunderstandings about the use of traditional music and dance, or because of unclear borders. On the web one can gauge the strong animosity between the two countries, with harsh words and name calling on both sides.

Aw likens this to sibling rivalry.

“The animosity between Malaysia and Indonesia is, and always has been, a kind of sibling rivalry. I think it is the kind of tension that might arise if two children who shared much in common happened to have very different paths in life. Essentially I think it boils down to wealth, and how the two countries see themselves in relation to each other.”

Aw said Indonesia has had a much tougher time, particularly in the 20th century. “History has not been kind to Indonesia — Malaysia has had much more luck in this respect.”

Malaysia’s smaller size made its problems smaller in scale, he said. “We were able to become relatively prosperous and have more of a middle class earlier than Indonesia. But Indonesia has a much
older, richer and more varied history and culture — it is, after all, a far bigger country.

“I sometimes think Malaysia knows this and has a kind of inferiority complex that manifests itself in a kind of nouveau-riche arrogance,” he adds.

Despite the seeming animosity, Aw said ultimately there was more closeness between the countries than tension.

Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post, Ubud, Bali | People | Thu, November 04 2010

Etgar Keret: Israel’s urban challenge

Israeli writer-director Etgar Keret, 43, said Jewish people usually gave their children names with meanings.

Keret’s first name means challenge. His last name means urban. “So my name means urban challenge,” he said.

He explained this in a prelude as to why his short stories are mostly based in urban settings. Keret is Israel’s best-selling short story writer who writes absurd and humorous tales of urban life in Israel. His works have been published in 30 languages and are included in Israel’s high school curriculum.

Having lived in Tel Aviv all his life, an urban life is the only one he knows, he says. “I think there’s something really urban about my mind… I love nature. But the most interesting thing for me is people. That’s why an urban setting is something that I like because you condense people together in small spaces. It heightens tension. It kind of pumps it out. So I like writing about urban life. And it’s also the only life I l know,” he said.

Keret was in Ubud, Bali, recently for the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. When it was suggested he would find Jakarta interesting, he said that his visa for Indonesia
only allowed him to travel to Bali for the festival. Coming from a country that does not have a bilateral relationship with Indonesia, Keret jokingly says: “I was born with the wrong passport!”

He was almost could not attend the festival and had to wait five days in Bangkok for his pass, “But I’m really glad I made it,” he said. When he received the invitation to the festival, he said he was very excited. “Because [Indonesia] is a part of the world that I can’t travel to normally. I was very curious,” he said.

Sitting in an Ubud restaurant over a plate of Greek salad, Keret said that one of the purposes of his writing was to humanize Israel in the eyes of people. “Not to make us saints,” he points out “but to make us human.

“Regardless of all the trouble that I have in my country, we are people. Some of us are better, some of us are worse,” he said.

Keret, a son of a holocaust survivor, has for a long time been a spokesman for peace, writing witty and poignant criticism in his op-eds about the war. In a 2007 interview, he once said that his family was like a microcosm of Israel. Keret, the youngest of three siblings went into the arts. His stories do not show any political leanings, never putting things in black or white. His brother, currently living in Thailand, is a peace activist who founded the legalizing marijuana movement in
Israel. His sister became ultra-orthodox. Her 11 children are forbidden on religious grounds to read Keret’s graphic novels, which he dedicated to them.

Keret said his wish was to reach out to different communities. “Just so they have a glimpse of how [Israelis] live,” he said.

His short story collections have entered bookstores in Muslim countries. “I’m the only Israeli writer since the second intifada [whose works are] translated and published in Palestine,” he said. His books are published in Turkey as well.

Keret’s works have been translated in to 30 languages but the Indonesian language is yet to be one of them. “Nothing would make me happier to have an Indonesian one,” he said.

Reading Keret’s short stories, one sees the high-paced energy of urban life situations in his flowing sentences. But Keret’s surreal imaginations are what make his stories special.

During the festival opening, Keret read out his short story Fatso that tells of a man whose girlfriend morphs into a hairy man with no neck who wears a gold ring on his pinkie finger.

Fatso is a quirky love letter to Keret’s wife, Shira Geffen. They live in Tel Aviv with a 5-year-old son. Keret has co-directed the film Jellyfish with Geffen, based on a story that she wrote. The film went on to win best first feature at Cannes Film Festival.

Keret’s wild imagination in Fatso is only one example of how Keret’s mind explores the absurd. In Second Chance, he tells a story about a service that allows people to experience events and emotions that would occur if they had taken a different path in their lives simultaneously to the life they experience now. In Nimrod’s Flip Out, which also became the title of one of his short-story collections, he tells a story about how Nimrod’s suicide affected three friends who all experience mental episodes.

Keret said that writing had taught him to learn more about himself. Keret said he was an angry person when he was young. “I couldn’t articulate it but I had feelings that maybe I was being self-destructive. I just wanted to do something with my life. But I didn’t know how to do it. It was very frustrating,” he said.

Keret said the fact that he did not know what he wanted to be when he grew up “stoked deep fear in me”.

“Aggression usually comes from fear and incompetence. And I think writing taught me to be less afraid. And I became less angry. I know more about myself because of it.”

Keret has published his latest collection of short stories this year called Suddenly, A Knock on The Door.

He said that he would be traveling and has yet to think about his next project. “Between projects, I’m free falling. I don’t know what’s going on,” he said.

“There is something about writing. It’s like a gift. You can’t force people to give you a gift. If it comes, it comes,” he said.

Even now, Keret said, he felt uneasy about calling himself a “writer” on forms that ask his profession. “It’s what I do now. I don’t know if I will do it later. You know it’s like somebody who’s happy. They’re happy now. But who knows if they will be happy later.”

Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | People | Sat, October 30 2010

Ma Jian: A note to remember

Chinese writer Ma Jian, 57, whose works are banned in his home country, never tires of reminding people of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, which took place more than 20 years ago.

His latest book, Beijing Coma, recounts the story of a young student activist who falls into a coma after being shot during the Tiananmen protests. Through Ma’s protagonist Dai Wei, the reader finds out what it must have been like to grow up under communist rule.

For Ma Jian, who was present during the 1989 protests, his protagonist’s comatose state is a metaphor for the Chinese people, who after 20 years have either forgotten or ignored the death of the thousands of unarmed citizens on June 4.

“This is a problem in Asia as well as China. As long as people’s living standards improve and they live a comfortable life, they don’t care so much about abuses of human rights,” Ma Jian said recently in Ubud, Bali, as translated by his wife Flora Drew. He noted that many East Asian countries had grown economically but remained undemocratic.

Ma said he wrote Beijing Coma “not only to remind the young people [of China] about this history they may not know about but to also tell them about the idealism and optimism of young people 20 years ago”.

But given Ma’s books are banned in China, youth there is not able to access his books freely. Ma, who lives in London, said he knew more about what was happening in China than the people living there because of the government’s tight policy on information dissemination. He also has more freedom to express his views compared to his friends who live in China.

“Some writers in China perhaps feel they have freedom of expression – that things have improved but they are fooling themselves,” he said.

“Young Chinese writers have grown up in this culture. They are somehow able to circumvent it through the Internet but they can’t use sensitive words, otherwise access to their content will be blocked,” he said.

Ma hopes the Internet will help Chinese youth read his works.

Ma and Drew attended the Ubud Writers and Readers festival. The day Ma talked to The Jakarta Post, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced imprisoned Chinese and human rights activist and writer Liu Xiaobo had won the Nobel Peace Prize.

“These things indicate the West is putting pressure on China to respect freedom of speech,” Ma said.
Ma moved from Beijing to Hong Kong in 1987 shortly before his books were banned there. He now lives in London with Drew and their four children. Every time he came back to China, he was under constant monitoring, he said. In 1989, he joined the student protests, but a few days before the day of the massacre, Ma returned to his hometown in Qingdao as his brother fell into a coma after an accident.

Ma said that had he stayed in China, one of two things would have happened. “One, I would have remained a writer and would be in jail. Or, I would have given up writing altogether because if I cannot write freely, I would prefer not to write.”

Ma met Drew in 1997 on the night Hong Kong was handed over to China. Drew, who had studied Chinese in London, was at that time making a documentary for an American television station. She read Ma’s books, which he showed to her, and was convinced they needed to be translated into English.

After Ma moved to London, Drew translated his memoir Red Dust for almost two years while he was writing. The book about Ma’s precarious three years of traveling in China in his early 30s, at a time where travel permits were required to travel anywhere inside China, went on to win the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.

Red Dust was published in China under a pseudonym, but only after half of the content was censored, Ma said.

Ma set off on the journey because he wanted to see China through his own eyes. He was a state journalist before and explained everything that was shown to him was pre-arranged to paint a rosy picture. When he reached Tibet, he penned his findings in his first book Stick Out Your Tongue, about Tibet’s underbelly.

China is still Ma’s spiritual homeland, which he will continue to stay connected to. He said living away from China helped him see the country more clearly, like looking at a mountain from afar.

Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post, Ubud, Bali | People | Thu, October 21 2010

Teater Garasi: Embracing the in-between

Drops of fortune: Actress Hanny Herlina looks up at money falling from the sky. Garasi actors impersonate Tarling-Dangdut performers, who in real life, receive money thrown or given to them by the audience. — Photo by courtesy of Festival Salihara

The sight of a big-eared red Teletubby with a Mohawk pushing dangdut singing women on a yellow makeshift boat into a crowd of amused art lovers is bound to create a surreal and absurd image.

So do women performing the traditional tari topeng (mask dance) using plastic masks of robot action heroes to the otherworldly sounds of blipping techno music.

But, these vignettes, part of experimental artist collective Teater Garasi’s latest play Tubuh Ketiga: Pada Perayaan yang Berada di Antara (The Third Body: On Embracing the In-Between), are not mere imaginary visions popping out from the minds of the Yogyakarta-based collective.

Directed by Yudi Ahmad Tajudin who collaborated with members of Teater Garasi, Tubuh Ketiga is an essay in the form of a visual art performance based on observations of Tarling-Dangdut art from the Indramayu community.

A coastal city near the border of Central and West Java, Indramayu is a crossing point between strong Sundanese and Javanese cultural centers; the urban life of Jakarta and sleepy rural village life; an industrial and agricultural area; and tradition and modernity.

Teater Garasi’s Tubuh Ketiga became a tribute to the people who live in the space in between, celebrating the latter’s relaxed openness to different cultures from virtually every direction.

The people from Indramayu have developed their own brand of art namely Tarling-Dangdut, a mixture of electric guitar, percussion, Sundanese flute with gamelan sensibility, combined with India-influenced Dangdut music and even techno sounds created from old chips.

By way of bricolage, Indramayu people take popular culture references and use them as their own. Beyond the tackiness of the performances, Teater Garasi sees a soupçon of nonchalance in the meeting of different cultures — a refreshing attitude amid some of today’s fear-filled reactions toward change in the form of fundamentalism and chauvinism.

Teater Garasi presented Tubuh Ketiga on Oct. 11 and 12 at Salihara. Like a warm village reception, friends of Garasi formed a line and greeted the audience. Steamed bananas, peanuts and glasses of water were served to spectators, who took their places on the floor, the low-wooden platforms or stood at the back of the theater.

Guitar riffs accompanied poet Gunawan Maryanto, the night’s MC. His singsong voice kept on rolling word after word, until the white curtain located behind a metal bench adorned with fake flowers — and bearing the sign “Congratulations for a new life in the globalization era” — was torn down.

As the curtain fell, the audience saw a painting of the sun setting behind the mountain, rice paddies and factories on screens surrounding Salihara’s black box theater walls. The play about Tarling-Dangdut singer Shanti Revaldi began.

In the 70-minute performance, tari topeng maestro Wangi Indriya danced with Sri Qadariatin, and Hanny Herlina with Theodorus Christanto.

The play featured a varied selection of songs from Kucing Garong (Wild Cat), Mujaer Mundur (Backward Fish) to Bjork’s It’s not up to You.

The most profound moment of the play was Wangi’s singing of the song Rhizomatic while Hanny swayed her hips and mouthed the lyrics as if singing in slow motion. The two women sat on the makeshift boat, while the red Teletubby pushed the boat, slicing into the crowd of people.

Members of Teater Garasi started taking interest in Indramayu two years ago when they produced
Je.ja.lan, a play inspired by street life in Yogyakarta, Jakarta and Indramayu.

“We’re very interested in culture formed through the meeting of different cultures,” Yudi said.
Given Indramayu’s reputation as a crossing point, it was the logical place to go.

Garasi went to Indramayu in April after the harvest to observe the festivities.

“There was an extraordinary social phenomenon. Post-harvest, Indramayu turns into a center of festivals. Everywhere there are stage performances, in which Tarling-Dangdut becomes the main event,” Yudi said.

For Yudi, the people from Indramayu’s relaxed attitude toward different cultures surrounding them is valuable. “They arbitrarily take from here and there and recreate.”

In today’s interconnected world, an individual is no longer a construct of one single culture, which makes the question of identity becomes less important, Yudi added.

“The question is not about identity. The question is not ‘Who am I?’ but ‘What can we create?’” Yudi went on.

“In fact, many cultures construct the ‘I’. The traditional, the modern, the authentic, the alien — they all construct ‘I’, the subject.”

As in Garasi’s Je.ja.lan “dance-theater-cum-theater of images” production, the audience occupied almost the same space as the actors. Spectators were continually interacting with the actors, as the latter would use the entire theater as their stage.

“I place the audience and actors in the same space. The boundaries between stage, actor and audience become blurred,” Yudi said.

“Because, what is important for me in the two works is dialogue, interaction. It’s not the fiction or the art. I’m underlining communication rather than aesthetics. The play is merely a medium, my way to create dialogue on the issue of the idea that is being conveyed,” he said.

Tubuh Ketiga was indeed a fun dialogue.

Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Art and Design | Mon, October 18 2010

Royston Tan: Something to remember

Singaporean filmmaker Courtesy of Royston TanRoyston Tan’s biggest fear in life is losing his memory. He is afraid that one day his brain will give up on him and he won’t be able to remember a single thing.

That is why he makes films. If ever that uneventful day occurred, he said, his films could be played to him in hospital.

“[My biggest fear] is not cancer, or anything else, but that I may lose my brain. In each of my short films, there’s a story. But there’s also a personal story behind it. I want to remember all of this,” he said.

His latest short film project is Ah Kong. Commissioned by Singapore’s Health Promotion Board, the film focused on the issue of dementia. Tan said he had to confront his fear during his research while he talked to people with dementia.

An award winning filmmaker, Tan is one of Singapore’s most prominent directors. His famous short film on Singapore’s street gangster youth subculture, 15, which became a feature-length film, transformed him into a sort of Singaporean cult icon. In 2004, at the age of 28, he entered the list of Time’s Asian Heroes for pushing the creative envelope of Singapore’s cinema.

Jakartans were delighted when they had the chance to see his short films, selected by Tan himself, at the 9th Q! Film Festival. His films were screened for two nights on Sept. 25 and 26, before the Islam Defenders Front (FPI) brouhaha, in which the radical Islamic group rallied in front of the venues demanding the closing of the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Transgender, Bisexual)-themed film festival.

His film screening showcasing four of his short films were packed. Tan also said he could hear the audience sobbing as they watched. A good thing, he said, as that meant his films touched them. He also noted that Jakarta was the only place in which he received long emails from people after his film screenings. He received emails after the screening of his musical 88 at the 2008 Jakarta International Film Festival (JiFFest), and the Q! Film Festival was not that much different, he said.

The Jakarta Post met up with Tan recently before his departure to Malaysia. Busy as a bee, the young director will soon be film-festival hopping to Japan, Korea, France and Germany. “I’ll be away from Singapore for five weeks,” he said.

Sitting over a glass of cream mocha, he talked about his passion for short films and brushes with his country’s censorship board. One short film screened at Q! was Cut, a hilarious short film lambasting Singapore’s censorship body. Tan made Cuta year after the censorship board cut 27 scenes from his feature film 15.

Tan said that despite the country’s strict censorship policy, he did not expect 15 to receive such a heavy hand. An honest depiction of Singapore’s fringe society, Tan said the film was important for Singaporeans. Tan likened the scene cuts to having delivered a baby in hospital only to be told that the baby was evil and had to have its arms and legs amputated.

The film 15 has received many awards and has been screened all around the world. It was screened once in Singapore, in which it was sold out in 45 minutes, he said. “It shows that Singaporeans are very curious about what is real. It’s a shame that authority refuses to admit that,” he said.

“I just feel that censorship is outdated,” he said, adding that the Internet era could not stop anyone from accessing information. For Tan, censorship only deprives people from discussion. “Witholding content deprives people of knowledge. Through distributing more content, you make them think and reflect on what is right and wrong,” he said. “Let people make a choice.”

With four feature films and 25 short films to his name over his 14-year career span, Tan said he aimed to express what he wanted to say through his works and re-introduce to Singaporeans what was “rightfully theirs”. “Sometimes in the midst of shaping the country, certain things are filtered out. I think what is missing is our real identity”.

Tan’s films are mostly social realist films as well as several experimental ones. For 15, he hung out with Singaporean teenage gangsters for one year before shooting.

His observation skills come from being a misfit, he said. Growing up in a kampung, Tan said he was one of the last to move to Singapore’s housing estates. He said the experience of moving from the kampung to apartment blocks was traumatizing as a seven-year-old.

“So my childhood was different. I grew up with animals. I grew up with people and nature — and [with] people who are generally making do with what we have in the environment. And when I went to elementary school, I realized that the way people did stuff was different,” he said.

Tan said he had trouble communicating with people, and spent a lot of time alone talking to his imaginary friends. He would quietly observe the people around him, he said.

He found his life path as a filmmaker at the end of secondary school. He took video-production class and soon found himself borrowing the camera over again.

His newest project premiered in Sapporo on his birthday, Oct. 5. The 3-D film titled Fishlove is a tribute to Hiroaki Muragishi, the actor of Tan’s experimental award-winning short film Monkeylove. Muragishi died in 2006 in a swimming accident in a river in Kouchi, Japan. The actor played an orange simian in search of his stolen heart during the cold Japanese winter. The monkey could not remember who stole his heart, walking through the snow to ask the mountain for clues.

“I wanted to make this film Fishlove to commemorate [Muragishi]. It’s a story about a fish that kept having memories about him walking through the snow,” he said.

Tan said he would give the film to the actor’s mother. “His mother said, ‘When my son gave me a copy of the short film I was joking with him, laughing. Because why would my son give me this funny film about him being a monkey to me? I just laughed. But now that he has passed away, I know it is to remind me that inside the film he’s always alive’.”

Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | People | Thu, October 14 2010

Nani Zulminarni: Dare to be a woman

Women’s empowerment activist Nani Zulminarni had a few reasons to be angry in the late 1990s.

Her marriage broke down, her husband married another woman, and to top it off, she was discriminated against at work for being a divorcee.

So she resigned from her job as the director of the Center for Women’s Resources Development (PPSW).
But when one door closes, another one opens. And sure enough, in 2001, Kamala Chandrakirana, the head of the National Commission on Violence Against Woman (Komnas Perempuan), asked Nani to work on a project documenting widows in conflict areas, starting in Aceh. The project morphed into a comprehensive program she is now heading called Pekka, or Women-Headed Household Empowerment.

Nani successfully turned her anger into a relentless source of energy for the next decade, helping women who are the sole breadwinners in the household — widows, women abandoned by their husbands, and unmarried women who have dependants — organize themselves into self-reliant groups.

These women, who just like Nani carried the burden of providing for a family without a husband, were at the bottom of the system, Nani explained.

It is for this work that Nani received the Saparinah Sadli award last month. The award, named after the 83-year-old feminist scholar who founded Indonesia’s first women’s studies program at the University of Indonesia, is given to women who play an influential role in empowering women.

More than 1,000 Pekka self-reliant groups of women have mushroomed across eight provinces, with the program reaching 10,000 families. Pekka is planning to create groups in nine more provinces in Indonesia.

Sitting in her office in East Jakarta, Nani said she felt the award was an acknowledgement of the struggle of thousands of widows in Indonesia.

According to the 2007 National Economics Census, 6 million households in Indonesia are headed by women, covering more than 30 million citizens.

Nani explained households headed by women were generally poor and in many cases, the poorest among the poor in Indonesia.

Women joining the program are usually between 20 to 60 years old, more than 38.8 percent are illiterate and have never received formal education. They have up to six dependents and mostly work as farm laborers or in other informal sectors including small trade. Upon joining, they usually earn less than one US dollar per day.

For Nani, Pekka has been a spiritual journey that helped her find the meaning of her life.

When she started Pekka, she was at the lowest point of her life.

“Pekka is a healing process. That’s why it feels like I didn’t fight for other people [but I fought for myself],” she said.

The incredible spirit of Pekka women constantly facing hardship inspired her, she went on.

As part of her work empowering women economically and socially, Nina trained Pekka members to save up for business ventures, and taught them the basics of micro-financing.

Financial aid, provided by Pekka and funded by the Japanese government through a World Bank trust fund, was channeled through a government program at the district level. “We made sure the money was not embezzled,” Nani said.

It was hard work to train the women at first, Nani said, as many of them had never finished school.

“At the beginning [of the training], members would sometimes write Rp 100,000 with four zeroes,” she said.

The training, estimated to run for a year, was carried out over 18 months.

Some groups were very successful, with one growing its capital from Rp 50 million to Rp 300 million.
“We didn’t want the money to just be handed over to the women and then spent.”

After coordinating Pekka for three years, Nani finally forgave herself and her former husband. “After I let go of my anger, I felt so good and happy.”

She explained discrimination toward women stemmed from people’s interpretation of religious texts, which places the woman as a subordinate and defines how good women should behave.

“Women are always defined in relation to other people. A woman is a daughter at first. Then she becomes someone’s wife, and after someone’s mother.”

Women in today’s society are still brought up to be wives, she said.

“Ask any parent in any part of Indonesia. They will be ashamed if their daughter does not marry,” she said, adding that if a marriage ended, society still blamed the woman.

Nani recalled suffering from discrimination on several occasions. During her divorce trial, for instance, the judges stated she was to blame for her husband remarrying. During a meeting with women in Aceh, a village leader asked her how she could organize Pekka if she couldn’t hold a marriage together.

Nani believes there should be a new way of interpreting religious text that is more egalitarian. She said women should have choices and be able to make smart decisions in life.

Her advice to women? “Cross the line and get out of the box.”

Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | People | Mon, September 13 2010

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