Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina: The playful artist duo

The guy, Irwan Ahmett, was possibly hyperactive as a child, and having grown up into a playful adult, he now has frequent bursts of energy and ideas.

The girl, Tita Salina, is calm and quirky, and somehow gets the guy’s crazy ideas. After a few conversations, before Irwan even expressed his love to Tita, he told her: “I don’t know why, but I feel that I can make my dreams come true with you”.

He was 23. She was 25. Fast forward twelve years later, the two of them are married and had founded a design company: Ahmett Salina.

For the fi rst time since they got together, the two artists are collaborating in a breakthrough urban art project that combines site-specifi c city elements, interaction with people and multimedia tools. In the
project, dubbed “Urban Play”, they create art in the form of installation, photography, performance and video, based on elements of the city, and exhibit their artworks both in the city and cyberspace.

Both studied at the Jakarta Arts Institute (IKJ). Tita graduated, but Irwan didn’t. This, however, did not stopped Irwan from setting up a graphic design company with Tita, all the while setting up art movements, and participating in art exhibitions in Indonesia as well as abroad.

Irwan is the brainchild behind 2005 Change Yourself Project, where he went on a road show toting his Apple notebook computer and hundreds of round, blue stickers to Jakarta, Yogyakarta and Bandung, meeting young people and giving presentations, in which he suggested ways people could change for the better. He also held a solo exhibition of installation art at Ruang Rupa gallery, titled “Happiness”.

In all Irwan’s projects and exhibition, Tita supported him in the background.

Sitting in a Central Jakarta coffee shop, Tita answered “no” when asked whether she would like to have her own exhibition. “I’m the kind of person who likes to be behind the scenes,” she said.

In Urban Play, however, Tita is as much of a front person as Irwan. Leading and presenting their projects in the short videos of Urban Play, these can be seen at dgi-indonesia.com in the online exhibition section.

Tita’s calm and low-key personality complements Irwan’s front-man persona. The two also share a passion for design and have a strong affinity with Jakarta.

In fact, they complete each other’s sentence. They talk about the hardship they faced during the beginning of their relationship and tell their tear-jerking drama-series-style love story with relaxed humor.

Just like in the typical plot of a romantic series, they disliked each other at fi rst, Tita said.

“The first time I saw her was when she was making a speech. She was running for president of the
student senate,” he said and paused for a moment. “That was the worst speech I’ve ever seen.”
Irwan, a freshman at IKJ, said he swore he would not vote for her.

“Little did I know I would choose her as my wife later,” he said.

Tita said that she only knew him in passing. “I had other boyfriends,” she said. “All I knew was that he was in the senate, and he was a pain.”

Irwan said that despite not paying much attention to her, he had always been interested in her artworks and appreciated them.

Their love began to blossom after university along with their collaboration in design. Tita’s best friend
lived in the same place as Irwan. As she visited the place to meet her best friend, Tita and Irwan fi nally started chatting.

“I instantly became attracted to her after talking to her a couple of times,” Irwan said. Irwan had many ideas in his head and liked to discuss them with Tita. With her art background, she responded and gave him feedback.

“I see him as the dark side of me.

I’m a plain person. My parents are conservative. My crazy ideas are in him. He can channel that side of me,” she said.

They finally collaborated for the first time, and their project was the cover of Naif band’s 1998 self-titled debut album. The two fi nally founded their design company Perum Desain Indonesia, which they later named Ahmett Salina in 2006.

But Tita’s parents disapproved of their daughter going out with Irwan, who had dropped out of college, resigned from work, and just started setting up a company.

“Tita’s late father summoned me and said: ‘Can you explain your plans for your future with Tita?’” Irwan said.

He told Tita’s father that he liked music, fi lm, art, and performing. “If I combine all this I can sell my dreams to people. I can sell my imagination to people. This potential is a field that I’m trying to develop right now,” Irwan re-told what he said to Tita’s father.

“Now, I know that was a wrong answer,” he said.

Tita resorted to tears and constant pleading, but her parents did not budge, she said.

“At one point he [Irwan] gave me an ultimatum, stating that I had to give him an answer in two days or he would leave. I was like ‘Noooo, I don’t want to lose you’,” she said in a dramatic fashion.

Finally she went up to her father at dawn after a sleepless night. “I said to my dad, ‘I want to get married, and I want to marry him’.”

Finally her father gave in. They tied the knot shortly after. Now they live just above their offi ce in Pasar Minggu, East Jakarta.

“At first we were worried; being together 24 hours a day. But we stay professional in our work and give
each other space,” she said.

Tita said Irwan and she created non-commercial art as a catharsis.

“Sometimes our work clients don’t agree with our ideas. So, this is a venue where we can express ourselves freely,” Tita said.

Irwan, who hailed from the small town of Ciamis, said he was possibly hyperactive as a child, as he could not stand still and concentrate at school. His father, a teacher, let him play as much as he liked and never pushed him to study. Creating art, he said, was a game to play for him.

Tita and Irwan said they had many ideas in their head for their future projects. But one of those ideas they want right now is a child to play with. “That’s our project we haven’t completed yet,” Irwan said,
and laughed.

Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | People | Mon, May 31 2010

Louise Arbour: Woman of justice

Having worked as the chief prosecutor for two international criminal tribunals, as the United Nations high commissioner for human rights and now assuming the post of the president of the conflict prevention organization International Crisis Group, 63-year-old Canadian judge Louise Arbour says that conflict is part of human life.

“Conflict, I think, is part of human life. The real issue is conflict resolution; how to handle conflict. You cannot avoid conflict. The key is how you can respond to it; how you anticipate it; how you manage it; and how you resolve it,” she said recently.

Arbour who took up the position as president of the International Crisis Group (ICG) in July 2009 after ending her four-year term as the UN’s high commissioner for human rights a year before, was recently in Indonesia, one of ICG’s bases for Southeast Asia.

Arbour was in the region to meet with her colleagues and look at the situation in the region. Arbour last visited Indonesia in 2007 as high commissioner. On Indonesia, she said the country had established a point of leadership in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Domestically, the country has managed to achieve and maintain stability post-1998 reform era.

“Looking at the current situation in Indonesia, there is cause to be optimistic that Indonesia is much better equipped today to deal with these kinds of challenges than it has been in recent history,” she said.

Coming from her, the comment can be considered a compliment for the country. Arbour is famous for her frank — and for some, controversial — comments. In 2006, at the height of the Israel — Lebanon war she issued a statement that, “The scale of the killings in the region, and their predictability, could engage the personal criminal responsibility of those involved, particularly those in a position of command and control”. These words were seen by many as directed toward Israel, and were rejected by Israel’s ambassador to Canada.

Now, working in a civil society organization, Arbour said the organization had tremendous freedom to work, which was different to her work in the UN organization. International Crisis Group publishes more than 80 reports and briefing papers annually, as well as the monthly CrisisWatch bulletin assessing the current state of play in some 70 countries or areas of actual or potential conflict.

“There’s a very big difference in the scope and authority of the two positions. The high commissioner for human rights is a high-ranking official in the United Nations with a very large staff. But at the same time, inside the United Nations, as a UN official you are constrained by what member states are prepared to allow or not allow. The political framework of the United Nations is that the shareholders are the 192 states. At times, they are very much in conflict. At other times, they are firm in preventing a certain course of action. So, in a sense, it’s a role that has considerable influence, but not a lot of power,” she said.

She said as high commissioner her only mandate was human rights. “Not conflict resolution. Not political consideration. You just have to be an advocate for human rights protection and promotion,” she said.

Meanwhile, in ICG it was a little more complex, she said. “We’re still guided by human rights principles but we are driven by something that is also pragmatic, which is, at the end of the day, if you’re doing conflict management or conflict prevention or conflict resolution, you have to balance the purity of the principle and the likelihood of obtaining the right result. There is always tension between the desirable and the feasible,” she said.

She said the question was to find a point where there was a chance to achieve a result. “So it’s principles and pragmatism coming together,” she said.

“As a civil society organization, or a nongovernmental organization, we have tremendous freedom to work where we choose to work, assuming again we’re welcome by the government, we can’t impose our presence.

“I think over the years, the ICG has developed enough credibility that most governments understand that, even though we might not agree with everything they say we will always represent their point of view accurately. Even if we disagree with it, our analyses are not biased. We don’t work for anyone, we don’t represent any country,” she said.

Arbour’s first brush with human rights issues, she said, was as a lawyer in Canada. In 1992, Canada passed a new constitution that guaranteed all the fundamental human rights and civil liberties.

“To me, it profoundly changed the nature of Canadian society, of political discourse. My first interest was criminal law. But slowly I became more interested in human rights issues,” she said.

“My first opportunity internationally was sort of a mixture of the two,” she said. In 1996, then UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali appointed her as chief prosecutor of war crimes before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia in The Hague.

In 1999, she was appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada. She took the post as high commissioner in 2004.

Arbour said she believes strongly in the universality of human rights. She disagrees with the notion of cultural relativism of human rights, which was championed by Southeast Asian leaders in the 1990s, such as former Singapore prime minister Lee Kuan Yew and former Malaysia prime minister Mahathir Mohamad.

“I think in all the work I’ve done all my life, I’ve never met one single person on earth that, given the choice, would renounce any of the rights that are guaranteed, the right to life, to health, to freedom, to be free from torture. Everybody wants that,” she said.

Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | People | Tue, May 18 2010

Sri Mulyani Indrawati: Woman of the century

“She could be the finance minister anywhere in the world,” says James Castle, founder of the consultancy Castle Asia. “She’s that good”.

Castle told that to Newsweek magazine last year on Indonesia’s outgoing finance minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati. She is stepping down from her post, which she had held since 2005, to join the top ranks of the World Bank under its president Robert Zoellick.

President Susilo Bambang Yu-dhoyono approved of her resignation to work for the World Bank.

In a televised statement Yudho-yono on the departure of Mulyani, who was crowned as the best finance minister in Asia by Emerging Market Forum and finance minister of the year in the world by EuroMoney in 2006, said her departure was “a big loss”.

He said he would ensure however that her successor would carry on the financial and tax reforms she had initiated during her tenure.

Mulyani, 47, will start June 1 as one of the Washington-based bank’s three managing directors, the highest rank under Zoellick.

She will replace Juan Jose Daboub, former minister of El Salvador, who will complete his four-year term June 30, overseeing 74 nations in Latin America, the Caribbean, East Asia and the Pacific, the Middle East and North Africa, the World Bank said.

Analysts said this was a good exit for Mulyani, who with Vice President Boediono, was the target of an opposition campaign accusing them of abusing their authority during the Rp 6.7 trillion (US$716 million) bailout of Bank Century in 2008.

“The appointment is like a win-win solution,” said Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa, an economist at the Danareksa Research Institute in Jakarta. The new job can help Sri Mulyani save face. “She has been facing a lot of political pressure,” he said as quoted by Bloomberg.

Mulyani’s support for the decision to bail out Bank Century in 2008 in order to avert a wider systemic banking and financial crisis was the subject of a highly politicized parliamentary inquiry. The Corruption Eradication Commission is currently investigating the case and has questioned Mulyani on her policy decision.

Legislators had proposed to remove Mulyani from her official duties during any investigation or legal process. The government refused this proposal.

However, apart from the Century saga, her work in dismantling the structure of crony capitalism built during Soeharto’s authoritarian regime, slashing public and private debt, and spearheading sweeping reforms in customs and tax administration is testament to her outstanding achievements in the field of Indonesian economic reform.

During Mulyani’s time as finance minister, Southeast Asia’s largest economy has become a member of the group of 20 leading economies and one of the fastest growing in the region.

Fitch upgraded the country to “BB+”, a notch below investment grade, in January 2010 primarily in recognition of the improvements to sovereign credit-worthiness arising from improved fiscal policy discipline and falling debt ratios. Indonesia is expected to achieve the coveted investment grade within a couple of years to be on par with the emerging market elite of Brazil, Russia, India and China, known as the BRIC nations.

The World Bank said that Mulyani had navigated successfully in the midst of the global economic crisis.

“She has been an outstanding finance minister, with in-depth knowledge of both development issues and the role of the World Bank Group,” Zoellick stated in a press release.

Mulyani, born in 1962 in Tanjung Karang, Lampung, completed her doctorate in economics from the University of Illinois. She has been an avid fighter for Indonesia’s economic reform since the days following the 1997 Asian economic crisis. She was then the head of the University of Indonesia’s Institute for Economics and Social Research (LPEM UI).

Together with 13 other young economists, including Mari Elka Pangestu (now trade minister), Miranda S. Goeltom (former senior deputy governor of Bank Indonesia), and Anggito Abimanyu (now the Finance Ministry’s head of fiscal policy), they presented the Declaration for Saving Indonesia’s Economy.

Mulyani and Anggito later became the members of president Abdurrahman Wahid’s economic advisory team. Wahid’s presidency lasted less than a year and ended in July 2001 with the rise of president Megawati Soekarnoputri.

When rumors spread on Mul-yani’s candidacy in the new cabinet, she silenced them by heading to Atlanta in the US, to work as a consultant for the US Agency for International Development. In October 2002, she was appointed as the executive director of the International Monetary Fund to represent the Southeast Asian countries in its Washington, DC headquarters.

Indonesia’s next president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, came to power in October 2004 and managed to lure her back as the state minister for national development planning.

A year later, in 2005, during a cabinet reshuffle, Mulyani was made the head of the Finance Ministry.

Mulyani in an interview said that as finance minister the goal of government economic policies was for people “to develop, be prosperous, get enough income, be able to meet all their needs from the day they were born until the day they die: education, food, health, recreation, all at affordable levels”.

Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | People | Thu, May 06 2010

Hans Kung: Encouraging interfaith dialogue

A proponent of religious dialogue, Swiss-theologian and Catholic priest Hans Küng is a highly respected ecumenical advocate and a controversial figure within the Catholic Church.

He established the global ethics project, a global peace movement that started in the early 1990s to find shared values between religions and humanistic beliefs despite “dogmatic” differences. Küng is also an outspoken critic of the Roman Catholic Church and the current pope, Benedict XVI.

The 82-year-old recently visited Jakarta and gave seminars on global ethics, dogmatism and religious fundamentalism. Sitting in a hotel meeting room in Central Jakarta, the silver-haired controversial
priest talked to The Jakarta Post about his views on Catholicism today, the role of religion in a more secularized society, his calling towards priesthood and his belief in the existence of god.

Born in 1928, Küng said his decision to become a priest came at a very young age — in his early teenage years. He studied theology and philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and was ordained in 1954.

He has been a firm advocate for church reform most of his life, becoming the first major Catholic theologian to reject the doctrine of papal infallibility. In 1971, he released a book Infallible? An Inquiry, in which he maintained that papal authority was made not by God but by man and was therefore reversible. This prompted the Vatican to rescind his ecclesiastical teaching permission in 1979 as Küng refused to withdraw his challenge against papal authority. Küng however continued to serve as a tenured professor of ecumenical theology at the University of Tübingen, Germany, and was also director of the Institute for Ecumenical Research until his retirement in 1996.

Recently, in conjunction with the fifth anniversary of the election of Benedict XVI as pope, Küng wrote an open letter to the church bishops published in the Irish Times, motivated by “profound concern for our church, which now finds itself in the worst credibility crisis since the Reformation”. The Catholic Church has been under a spotlight after revelations of clerical abuse of children and adolescents, in the US, Ireland and Germany.

He appealed to the bishops to set about reform and call for a council, a conference of bishops.

Both Küng and Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, were in the second Vatican council (1962 to 1965), the latest ecumenical meeting of bishops, which dealt with the Church and its relation to the modern world.

The Vatican II resulted in liturgical reform, religious freedom, ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue.

Küng deemed that Benedict had yet to make the spirit of the Second Vatican Council “the compass for the whole Catholic Church, including the Vatican itself”.

He said the problems with the Catholic Church had to do with papal absolutism, the role of clericalism and the law of celibacy. Clericalism placed the priest above everybody as a holy man, he added. “They are not holy men, they are servants of the people,” he said.

With regards to the law of celibacy, introduced in the 11th century, Küng said it should be abolished and that women should be allowed into the ordination. Küng added that although sexual abuses also happened in other institutions such as families and schools, it was prevalent in the Catholic Church under celibate leadership. In the New Testament, he pointed out, Jesus and Paul practiced celibacy but allowed full freedom in this matter to each individual.

He also said that the rule of celibacy had prevented thousands of people from entering priesthood, causing a lack of new blood in the Catholic Church.

While he advocated reform within the Catholic Church, he voiced the need to put aside fundamental differences and build bridges

with the goal of attaining world peace through dialogue based on shared values.

In the seminar on Monday, Küng elaborated the four basic principles that all religions shared: “You shall not kill, murder, torture, rape. In positive terms, this means to have respect for life. You shall not steal, exploit, bribe or corrupt, which translates in positive terms as dealing honestly and fairly. You shall not lie, deceive, forge or manipulate.

“In other words, you must speak and act truthfully. You shall not commit sexual immorality, cheat, humiliate or dishonor. In positive terms, this means to respect and love one another”.

Küng’s opponents might find his dissenting opinions on the Catholic Church un-Catholic. But Küng responded they might not have read his books thoroughly. Küng has written prolifically — two memoirs, books about Christianity, the Catholic Church, Islam, science and religion, and global ethics.

Religion still plays a role in society, despite the process of secularization, he went on, which came about as a result of progress in science, democracy, philosophy and industrialization.

The world is an invitation to think about God, he noted, “not in a sense of rational proof but by credible reasons… It should be seen as a cosmic vision, which can run side by side with very serious science.”

Religion will still hold a place for people to find out about the meaning of life, about suffering and how humans can overcome it, and also to think about life after death, he said.

While he has always been inquisitive and critical, Küng has never doubted the existence of God.

“I doubted more the argument of his existence, than God himself. As a matter of fact, I never had the idea that God cannot exist. I would have found it irrational. To think that everything just comes out from nothing is not a rational position,” he said.

“But I do not accept rational proofs for God because that’s another dimension. This other dimension you can have reasons to believe, reasonable arguments for believing God, but not rational proofs.”

Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | People | Fri, April 30 2010

FX Harsono: Testimonies through art

When prominent artist FX Harsono’s father sent his son away from Blitar to Yogyakarta in 1969 to pursue a higher education, he thought his son would study engineering.

Little did he know Harsono had other plans for his future: To paint.

“I lied to my father,” Harsono recalled. “He didn’t approve of me studying art,” he said.

Besides enrolling into a technology institute, Harsono was also accepted into then newly established art school STSRI ASRI. Having a huge urge to paint and learn about the arts, he entered both schools, but lasted only three months in the technology one.

“A year later, I finally told [my parents] and they had to willy-nilly accept my decision,” he said. “My father said: ‘Do as you wish, you’re an adult’.”

A brave decision to make, Harsono knew he was to endure a trying experience as a struggling artist. His determination, however, paid off.

Entering the fourth decade of his career as an artist, his paintings, installations and videos that delve into the issue of political repression, discrimination and identity, are acknowledged around the world.

Locally, he is deemed the person who helped develop contemporary art in Indonesia as the exponent of the 1970s new art movement.

Currently, the Singapore Art Museum is displaying his works from 1975 to the most recent 2009 exhibition, “The Erased Time”. The exhibition titled “Testimonies”, which opened on March 4 will run until May 9.

In his Tangerang house in Bintaro, the bespectacled 62-year-old reminisced on his early years as an artist. “It was very tough… very tough,” he said. “But I persisted to make a living from my art,” he said.

He founded the Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru or New Visual Art Movement with fellow young artists in 1975 as a response to what he viewed was a very Western-influenced art favoring decorative painting by an older generation of artists.

An Indonesian of Chinese descent, Harsono began using social and political themes in his art because he believed they represented the current Indonesian situation at that time.

In a discussion at the Dutch cultural center Erasmus Huis earlier this month, Harsono said that had he and his friends returned to tradition to create more Indonesian-themed art, it wouldn’t have been representative of the times they lived in.

One of his 1975 works, The Relaxed Chain, shows mattresses wrapped in chains, commenting on people being oppressed under Soeharto, including in the most intimate parts of their lives.

His 1994 work The Voices Controlled by the Powers is an eerie piece showing rows of wayang masks with their bottom half severed looking inward toward a pile of their cut jaws. The installation was a commentary on the banning of the progressive Tempo magazine.

“During Soeharto’s era, we can say that democracy was nonexistent. No one could talk freely, no one could criticize Soeharto,” he said. “People were oppressed and we depended on courageous people to voice criticism,” he said.

Harsono said he knew things needed to change. However, only a handful of people were brave enough to voice their dissent. “As an artist I also needed to voice my concern,” he said.

With the fall of Soeharto and the emergence of a fledgling democracy, Harsono shifted his focus from social political commentary to inward reflection.

He used art to search for his identity as a man of Indonesian-Chinese descent in early 2000. Three years later, he exhibited his works titled “Displaced”.

“‘Displaced’ showed I felt I was in a space that didn’t feel right. I felt uncomfortable, curious and restless, and started to question many things,” he said.

He used the image of a butterfly stabbed with a needle as a metaphor for the pain Indonesian-Chinese individuals endured in the country.

“I feel I had been constantly discriminated.

“I am not overpowered by it, but it is a constant injustice,” he said.

During Soeharto’s era, Chinese culture was repressed. Even writing in Chinese was forbidden and Harsono had to change his Chinese name, Oh Hong Boen.

He explored this concept at a deeper level in his 2009 exhibition, “The Erased Time”, in which he juxtaposed images of the mass killing of Chinese-Indonesians in Blitar — after Indonesia’s independence, and his personal experiences. His father, a photographer, was part of the exhuming team.

At one point after the reform era, Harsono thought of leaving the country. “I did think about it after the 1998 May riots. I thought we truly lived in a country where people of Chinese descent would always be victims during social change,” he said.

During the 1998 May riots, mobs attacked Indonesian-Chinese businesses. There were also reports of alleged rape of females of Indonesian-Chinese descent.

Harsono, however, stayed and channeled his frustration into art instead. A testimony of Indonesia’s ugly truth.

Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | People | Tue, April 27 2010

Hadassah Emmerich: Looking beyond identity

The question of identity is an ever-present theme, which many artists like to explore as part of their self-discovery.

Berlin-based painter Hadassah Emmerich, who has a German-Dutch-Indonesian-Chinese background, however, said she had moved past trying to use art as a way to discover herself.

Her mixed-background prompted her to explore themes on different cultures, although she said she had abandoned using art to retrace her heritage background or reconnect with different cultures to find herself.

“I think now I’ve accepted more that you will never really know. It’s also up to you to be who you want to be,” she said. “I’m interested in artwork, not necessarily ‘me’ anymore,” she said.

The 36-year-old was in Indonesia recently for her latest exhibition at the Dutch cultural center Erasmus Huis, running from April 10 to May 4. Titled “Exopolis: Kembali ke Jakarta” (Return to Jakarta), she delves into exoticism in a playful manner. Her work in Exopolis consists of layers of different symbols taken from various cultures, times and settings, such as replicas of Paul Gauguin’s art.

Emmerich is the artist behind a noteworthy mural on the wall of the Dutch Embassy in Jakarta. Art commentator Carla Bianpoen likens the mural to “a maze of vibrant, exuberant, tropical colors evoking a sense of idiosyncratic yearning for a paradise lost”.

Having won several art prizes, Hadassah has exhibited her artwork since 1996, but it was her solo exhibition titled “With Love from Batik Babe” in 2005 that put her on the map.

Sitting in the Jakarta Arts Institute (IKJ) art department gallery after giving a lecture to students there, Emmerich talked to The Jakarta Post about how her heritage influenced her art, her search for identity and her journey as an artist.

“Without this background I may be searching within other sources, it’s hard to tell because you will never know how it would be otherwise,” she said.

“It makes me more curious on how cultures connect and where they connect. For example, I am attracted to universal stories, which are often love stories,” she said. “I’m also attracted to make collisions, to bring spirits together from different cultures that would never meet in real life. I figuratively take them from their graves and bring them back into one exhibition,” she said.

She recalling questioning her identity in her teenage years. Her Indonesian father moved to Holland when she was 6 years old. Her grandmother lived in the same house until Emmerich’s parents divorced. “Because my parents divorced, I lived with my mother and [our Indonesian culture] disappeared a little,” she said.

“Like every teenager, I asked ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What does this mean?’ ‘Is this exotic?’ and ‘How do people see me?’” she said. She even changed her name for five years until she was 17 from Hadassah to Marissa.

Hadassah is an uncommon name of Hebrew origin meaning myrtle tree. Emmerich said she did not have a Jewish background that she knew of and felt that her name did not suit her then.

She visited Indonesia in 1996 and studied art in Bandung. She came to Indonesia to answer three questions: Who am I? Do I have something in common with Indonesia? And, what is the art scene there?

“At that time it really was a big fantasy for me to come here, to explore,” she said.

However, her visit to Indonesia did not give her answers. “I came back with more questions and confusion,” she said.

Now, Emmerich said that she took on a more “mature” viewpoint. She said previously she used the questioning of her mixed-background identity or her femininity to drive her art but shifted to bigger themes after studying her Master’s of Arts in Fine Art in London. “I’m more interested in learning more about history and literature instead of questioning ‘who I am’.”

“The degree really helped me distance myself from what we call ‘navel looking’,” she said.

“In London, I learned even if I don’t have mixed blood, I can still come and take what I want. That’s the kind of attitude in London. It’s very rigorous, very cold. I was really surprised by that,” she said.

She said that she took her questions and gave them broader views. She added she was inspired by other artists “who had done the dirty work” to use as pawns in her stories. This she said was aimed to point to certain problematic themes.

Emmerich acknowledged that artists or art commentators of the older generation might not agree with her approach in playing with “exotic” styles, a theme she said people steered away from. She said people would consider it taboo to say Gauguin was good. “People are scared to take him on and are concerned about being politically correct,” she said. “Of course for the older generation, things have much more value and are untouchable,” she said.

But, she said that artists of her generation, who can apply many different references by connecting to the Internet, had more freedom in their art. Her approach, in taking different cultural symbols, gave her more freedom and she could be the “background”. “I’m a medium somehow,” she said.

Emmerich, who is expecting a baby, said that being a mother might also indirectly influence her work. “It makes me think of other things; maybe larger themes. I think it connects me to something very ancient, or universal. But how this will form, it’s difficult to say.”

Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | People | Sat, April 24 2010

Maria Farida Indrati: Feminine voice of reason

Those quick to pass judgment may think that Maria Farida Indrati, the only woman in the Constitutional Court, was also the only judge out of the nine-member panel to doubt the necessity of the pornography law because of her gender.

But on closer inspection, it turns out her objection to the Court’s recent decision to uphold the pornography law did not specifically defend women, but Indonesia’s pluralistic social reality in general. Coincidentally, she happens to be a woman.

Sitting behind a spacious desk at her office on the 13th floor of the Constitutional Court building, this 61-year-old small-framed judge spoke to The Jakarta Post about her views on the pornography law and her role as the only female judge in the highest legal institution in the country.

Last month, the Constitutional Court headed by Mahfud M.D. turned down a judicial review filed against the pornography law on the basis that the law provided exceptions for the arts, literature, traditional customs, sports and culture.

The court ruling however failed to address the legislation’s divisive nature. The tourist haven island-province of Bali, whose people have been one of the most vocal opponents of the law, refused to comply with it. Since its inception, the pornography law has drawn a huge outcry from women and human rights activists as well as artists.

Wearing a violet suit adorned with a golden flower brooch, Farida, as she is popularly called, said the law would obviously affect women the most.

“Because people see women differently. People think it is impolite for women to expose their skin, while a man walking topless on the street doesn’t cause the slightest stir,” she said.

Her objections to the pornography law are fourfold: The law is open to too many interpretations, the definition of pornography is ambiguous, the law is divisive and bound to be difficult to implement.

“The formulation of the law has drained the country of its energy because of its many pros and cons.”

Farida said a panel of judges was created to reach a verdict. For the pornography law, she headed a panel of three judges.

“All of the judges in that panel disagreed [with the plaintiff] except myself,” she said. From there, a plenary session of judges was held. “In the plenary session, all the judges agreed to reject the request citing the law did not ran counter to the Constitution. But the moment I looked at the first clause, I was certain this [the law] could not work,” she said.

The first clause defines pornography as “pictures, sketches, illustrations, photographs, articles, sounds, voices, moving pictures, animations, cartoons, conversations, body movements or other forms of messages through various communication mediums and/or public displays that contain obscenity or sexual exploitation that violates community norms”.

Other judges nevertheless respected her dissenting opinion, she said, treating her equally irrespective of her gender.

However, Farida acknowledged that a feminine presence in the panel of judges does help cool down the heated atmosphere during plenary sessions. “All of them are bapak-bapak [older men] with loud voices. I can speak sternly too, but am calmer.”

“When all of the bapak-bapak raise their voices, I just sit calmly. They soon realize I have turned silent and they are being too loud,” she said, smiling.

Farida said that being a Constitutional Court judge changed some parts of her life. Previously she used to help the government draft legislation, now she reviews the drafts. Sometimes, she confessed, when reviewing (a flawed) legislation, she would become agitated and wished she could go back to her old job of writing the legislation. “Because I know how hard the process of drafting legislation is,” she said.

Being a judge has also taken its toll on her social life. An amiable and social person at heart, Farida said she used to enjoy lively interaction with government officials, friends from academia, and students before her job as a judge became so demanding on her time.

“People leave me alone, now. When I used to teach, many people would want to talk to me. I had many friends; I used to talk in forums; departments would invite me to talk. I was more available to my students,” she said. “That’s something I miss.”

However, she said she understood that as a judge she should be more independent.

Farida still makes a point of keeping in touch with the important people in her life, namely her elementary school teacher, who made her believe in herself despite her ailment.

Sister Monika C.B., 72, now a nun at Panti Rapih in Yogyakarta, “was the one who always guided me and made me believe in myself”. Sister Monika, who was visiting Jakarta, even caught up with Farida at her office during the time of the interview.

The eldest of eight children, Farida — now a professor of Law in University of Indonesia, said she had never dreamt she would become a judge. “I wanted to be a piano teacher.”

Her childhood dream wasn’t so much driven by a love of music, but by the desire to pursue a career that would suit her ailment.

“I suffered from polio when I was little. I used to walk to and from school and people would imitate how I walked. I learned to play the piano, and thought that teaching just a few students piano would be nice.”
But her father, who worked as a journalist for the state news agency Antara in Surakarta, did not approve of

her career plans. He believed the music industry in Indonesia at that time — circa 1969 — was still in
its infancy.

So she pursued her studies at the University of Indonesia, where she became the top student in campus, then in Netherlands and the United States.

Only after she became an assistant to Prof. Hamid Attamimi, the founder of the Indonesian Constitution Science, did she know law was her path in life.

“I realized that I was good at this, and this is the path God has shown to me,” she said.

Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | People | Fri, April 16 2010

Lesbians face double discrimination

Lesbian world: A woman reads a lesbian online magazine. Non-political lesbian movements have used the Internet as their media. JP/R. Berto Wedhatama

Families can do twisted things on learning their daughter or sibling is a lesbian.

A brother would force his butch lesbian sister to perform oral sex in an attempt to “educate her”. A mother would hire a gigolo so that her daughter would know the “pleasure” of men.

The sexologist her mother brought her would grope her, asking whether she felt any excitement. Families would force femme lesbians into marriages the latter did not want.

These examples are the stories that came to the LBT (Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender) advocacy and research organization, the Ardhanary Institute, from women who have been abused because of their sexual orientation.

The director of Ardhanary Institute, RR. Sri Agustine, said recently at her office that violence toward the LBT individuals that came to Ardhanary’s crisis center was mostly carried out within the private sphere of the family home.

“At times, the home that is supposed to be the safest place becomes the most dangerous place. The most common type of violence is sexual abuse, especially toward butch females, by brothers, uncles, fathers who suspect the sexual orientation and wanted to ‘set them straight’,” she said.

“Femme lesbians would be forced into marriages because of the stigma of becoming an old spinster attached to unmarried woman,” she added. “A lesbian, who had been married for 13 years after being forced into it by her family, said she felt she had been raped for 13 years,” Agustine said.

The problem is compounded, she said, with the discrimination against LBT people by the state. The police force is yet to be sensitive toward crimes carried out on the basis of sexual orientation discrimination. Agustine said a police office, upon hearing that a rape victim was a lesbian, said: “No wonder you’ve been raped, you’re a lesbian”.

Victims of violence or sexual abuse would prefer to settle the problem without the help of the police. Or if they did report it to the police, did not say that the crime was related to their sexual orientation, Agustine said.

In Indonesia, entering the third decade of the gay movement, discrimination and oppression against homosexuals is still rife. Recently, intimidation from a hard-line religious group forced organizers of the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) Asia to cancel their conference in Surabaya, and the police did nothing to stop it.

For lesbian, bisexual and transgender women, their battle is twice that of their gay male counterparts. According to LGBT rights expert Baden Offord, Indonesian lesbians face double discrimination in terms of gender and sexual orientation.

“The Indonesian lesbian movement has a long way to go to bring about visibility and tolerance in the wider society,” he said through an email interview.

Compared to the transgender and gay movement, the lesbian movement in Indonesia is more discreet and less explicit. Agustine said this was due to the patriarchal culture in society.

“In the context of patriarchal culture, society teaches women to be passive and not active.

“There are more rules given to women. If a woman is yet to be married at a certain age, society labels her a spinster. This has made the LBT group more closed. If they came out, the family would be more ashamed,” she said.

“For gay men, society is more tolerant of them and of transvestites, because men have a place in public life. For lesbians, women have the traditional role of domestic life, to be a housewife and to be a ‘good woman’,” she said.

Agustine said she told lesbian women to claim their space.

“Be more educated, show society that we can contribute something,” she said.

Ardhanary works with different LBT groups across Indonesia, creating a vast network and support group.

In the Internet era, it is now easier for LBT individuals to find their community. Mailing lists, Internet forums and social networking sites such as Facebook have become an avenue for LBT people to meet and share stories.

Non-political lesbian movements have also used the Internet as their media. Online magazine sepocikopi.com is one example, in which the articles are written by and aimed at lesbians.

“SepociKopi is actually its own movement. We chose to ‘fight’ — not out — but in. How we view ourselves as humans and not conceptualize ourselves as marginalized,” Alex, SepociKopi editor-in-chief wrote in
an email.

“We believe in the power of words to light the path for lesbians when things seem dark and confusing. We’re not pushing lesbians to come out. We have a lot of articles that shows the pros and cons of coming out. But if they do want to, we push for them to do it in a positive way: to be a successful and high-achieving woman — who is coincidentally a lesbian,” she said.

Utari, a bisexual, said the sense of community did help her from being isolated and lonely. “No one around me that I know of is like me. It felt really lonely,” she said. Upon finding SepociKopi, Utari, 25, contributed to the website as well.

She has come out to her then boyfriend and later to a friend in the last year. “I think by coming out, I became more accepting of myself, because I could tell someone who accepted me as I am,” she said.

Agustine said the younger generation of lesbians was more open and educated. Sources of information are more readily available to them compared to the older generations of lesbians.

Since the reform era and the rise of the women’s movement in Indonesia, the lesbian movement in Indonesia, Agustine said, had become more inclusive, aligning themselves with the Indonesian women’s movement, such as Komnas Perempuan and Koalisi Perempuan Indonesia.

However, not all women’s groups were accepting of the lesbian movement, Agustine said.

Gay rights champion and founder of the first gay movement GAYa Nusantara Dede Oetomo said that, despite resistance, the incident of March 26, where the FPI harassed the ILGA organizers, showed that the LBT movement should join forces with any willing civil society elements

“Working with the women’s movement is clearly a logical choice even though there is resistance here and there. History in other countries and regions shows the same thing. However, the women’s movement is progressing, especially with the younger activists who are more open to sexual and reproductive rights discourses,” he said.

Lawmaker and human rights activist Nursyahbani Katjasungkana said up to now there had been no breakthroughs in legislation on the protection of the rights of sexual minorities.

She said she had fought for the rights of sexual minorities to be included in the legislation with legislator Eva Sundari during the drafting of the anti-racial discrimination bill and the citizens’ administration bill.

Both of the bills eventually passed into law witout including the rights of sexual minorities.

The anti-pornography law, in its definition section, states that being lesbian and gay, and sodomy,
were sexual deviations. And in Aceh, a bylaw, regulates that homosexuality can be punishable by stoning to death.

Nusyahbani said the discourse for the rights of sexual minorities had been pushed forward, but recent developments such as the anti-pornography law and the bylaw in Aceh had brought setbacks.

“LGBT groups are our social reality. They cannot be eliminated in the name of anything. Aren’t they God’s creatures as well?” she said

Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Life | Sat, April 10 2010

RR. Sri Agustine: A happy lesbian advocate

Attraction comes early to some people. For RR. Sri Agustine, she had her first crush at the tender age of six, on a girl in her class.

What first started as a sweet feeling became the start of a struggle to find her place in the world. After grappling with depression in her teenage years over her sexuality, which was different from the mainstream social norms; a spiritual crisis; running away from home and escaping poverty, she has now found solace as an open lesbian activist, advocating for the rights of lesbians, bisexuals and transgender individuals.

The director of the LBT (Lesbian, Bisexual, and Trangender) organization Ardhanary Institute, a research and advocacy group that supports the elimination of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation said she knew her life would not be simple when she accepted that she was a lesbian.

“My sexual orientation is different to the mainstream norms. I’m here and they’re there and I know that they will reject me because of the difference. But I have to fight so that society will eventually accept me as I am,” she said recently in her office.

With a crew cut, T-shirt and pants, Agustine is a slim, soft-spoken, butch female. Sitting in
Ardhanary’s modest office, she requested that the address of the office not be published, for fear of violent attacks.

She was recently in Surabaya, where a hard-line religious group, the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), barged in a hotel and intimidated organizers of the International Gay and Lesbian Association (ILGA) to cancel their planned conference.

Born into a strict Catholic family in Bandung, she said when she first started to feel sexually attracted
to girls in high school, she became depressed.

“My friends were able to talk about their crushes while I could only remain silent,” she said.

A friend of hers sensed that Agustine was a lesbian and advised her to talk to her psychologist aunt. The psychologist told her she should just let go of things that were burdening her. She said Agustine needed to be honest and open with herself and develop a high self-esteem by being a high achiever.

“She said Jesus himself was carrying one cross, while it was as if I was carrying a cross with the
addition of the guilt of being a lesbian. She said I should just let it go,” Agustine said.

When she started to accept herself, her grades went up again. She was intrigued to find out information about lesbianism and, in her quest, found an article on GAYa Nusantara, the first gay movement in Indonesia.

She wrote to the founder, Dede Oetomo, who replied by sending her the GAYa Nusantara magazine, the first publication in Indonesia intended for gay and lesbians. There were sections for correspondence, and she wrote to other lesbians in other cities.

“I finally found a community,” she said. Previously, Agustine said she had felt so isolated and alone.
She came out to her parents in her senior year in high school, bringing home her girlfriend. She said her parents had always sensed that she was a lesbian by the way she dressed and acted but were in denial. “They didn’t take it very well, and I was hit,” she said.

As she could not stand the pressure any longer, she ran away from home with a gay friend when she was in her first year at college. She started from scratch.

“We worked in factories,” Agustine said. She once sold teh botol drinks on trains.

While she uprooted herself from her home, one habit she kept from her father was his love for books. “My dad was very proud of being an intellectual. One sign of intellectuality, for him, was the collection of books one had,” she said.

Her father would make her choose between buying books or a motorcycle. “He would say, ‘If you buy a motorcycle, you won’t be able to buy books. But by buying books, you might be able to buy a motorcycle’,” she said.

So from the little money she could save, she would buy a book, thinking that by buying a book she would be able to pull herself out of poverty.

She attempted to study philosophy at the Driyarkara School of Theology but was not able to complete her studies due to having to work to support herself. In 2006, Agustine received a scholarship
to study sexuality and methodology in a sexuality research project in Amsterdam.

Through her astute ways, Agustine lifted herself out of poverty. She applied to a company for a graphic design job, saying she had mastered the graphic design software.

“I told them that I needed one week to relearn the software because it had been a while since I had used it. I had never used it in my life. I taught myself in that week. If I hadn’t done that, I would never have made it,” she said.

She joined the women’s movement in the early 1990s and eventually landed a job at the Indonesian Women’s Coalition (KPI) women’s group, to work for their in-house magazine Semai.

For Agustine, one way to make people accept her was to deconstruct people’s image of lesbian women.

When she first worked at KPI, most of her colleagues were scared of her. They were prejudiced and thought lesbians were sleazy, liked to poke their fingers, and were prone to harass her sexually.

Agustine said they were afraid she would fall in love with and pursue one of them.

She slowly changed the way her colleagues saw her by bringing her lesbian friends to her workplace and introducing them to her colleagues. After a while, her colleagues would come up to them and say, “Oh, lesbians are the same as other people”.

She is doing the same with her work at the Ardhanary Institute. She said people would not respond kindly to harsh or aggressive words such as to stop homophobia or the like. So at every event, we choose to use positive words for ourselves, for example: “Lesbians are happy because of their choice of sexual orientation”.

She gives interviews to morning talk shows on television. “We want to present a positive image of lesbians, that we can function well in society and achieve something,” she said.

Agustine said the struggle was still ongoing. While the LBT movement ally themselves with the women’s movement, she said within the movement there was some resistance to lesbians.

Agustine said she returned home after 10 years. Her father now has passed away, and her mother and siblings are more accepting. Her family’s openness is now being passed on to the younger generation, she said.

“One day, my nieces and nephew were sitting in the back of the car. My nieces were hugging each other and their brother said: ‘When two women love and care for each other that’s called lesbian’. The girls asked: ‘What about two men?’ and their brother said: ‘That’s called gay’. And what about hugging without [romantic] feelings the girls asked again, and the brother said ‘That’s called friendship’.”

For Agustine, one way to make people accept her was to deconstruct people’s image of lesbian women.

Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | People | Sat, April 10 2010

Sweet wine for the young palate

People in Indonesia prefer wines that give an immediate taste in the mouth. Wines that sommelier Suyanto calls ghost busters.

“Something that’s rich and full-bodied; complex with a strong taste,” he said.

With a relatively young wine-drinking culture, Indonesia’s wine consumers are mostly at the entry level, with consumers preferring sweet wines, Vin+ wine shop marketing manager Yolanda Simorangkir said.

“They like sweet wine, because it’s easier to drink, but after they’ve trained their palate, they will appreciate more and understand more,” she said.

Suyanto said many people came to him saying they knew nothing about wine but were eager to learn. “For a sommelier, this is a challenge,” he said.

Suyanto said he would start by introducing different grape varieties. For red wine, he would start with the Merlot, because it has a rich taste. The next would be the Cabernet Sauvignon that has a fruitier taste, and the complex-tasting Shiraz would follow.

For white wine, Suyanto will start with Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay.

Wines from the so-called New World countries – Australia, Chile, and Argentina – are popular among Indonesians. “Mostly because they produce wine with a full-flavor character. Something that has an oaky and vanilla taste,” he said.

Yolanda and wine expert from Decanter Wine House Yohan Handoyo said despite Indonesia’s tropical weather, in which white wine served cold would suit better, Indonesians preferred full-bodied red wines.
At Vin+, the ratio between red and white wines purchases is 70-to-30, Yolanda said.

With many wine shops and wine-tasting events in Jakarta, people who have just starting to drink wine have many ways to learn about it.

One can also learn from the award-winning book Rahasia Wine (The Secrets of Wine), written by Yohan. The book was described as “wise, practical and deep in wine culture” when it won the prestigious Gourmand Award for wine education in 2008.

Suyanto said that, classically, a good bottle of wine has a balance between acidity, fruitiness and mineral. “A good wine is when you smell it for the first time, you can smell whether the scent is strawberry or raspberry, or whether it had been in an oak barrel or not,” he said.

Restaurateur Dieter Speers said that one of the reasons why more and more Indonesians are into wine was because: “Once you develop a taste, you won’t be able to stop. It’s just too awesome.”

“Ultimately, one would usually settle with a nice red wine from a classic country like France. Nothing beats wine from the Bordeaux area,” the German national said.

Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Life | Thu, April 01 2010

Prodita Sabarini

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