Inside Indonesia with Europalia exhibition 'Power & Other Things'

As part of Europalia Indonesia, the exhibition “Power & Other Things” is exploring the past two turbulent centuries of Indonesian history, in order to enhance our understanding of the diversity on the biggest island archipelago in the world.

Indonesia, which is the fourth largest country in the world by population, is almost completely unknown in Europe. At most we know that the archipelago is the country of Bali and batik, but that is about it. For this reason alone, the new exhibition “Power & Other Things” at Bozar is worth a visit. According to Europalia, it offers a taster “of what Indonesia could be if it learned to exploit its potential”.

One example is the painter Jan Toorop, who is known exclusively as a Dutch painter in the artistic canon. Here he is presented as a Dutch-Indonesian artist who was of mixed heritage and grew up on Java. Self-portraits show the young Toorop in his studio dressed in Indonesian clothes. “Indonesia can never be separated from me,” the painter said, who spent the rest of his life incorporating batik patterns in his own version of art nouveau.

Through works by Toorop and twenty other Indonesian and Western artists, the exhibition attempts “to come to terms with the crimes of 450 years of colonialism.” This political perspective is a central leitmotif throughout the exhibition, which jumps back and forth through time and space, and makes underlying connections.

Different views

Another example is Raden Saleh (1811-1880). He was the first Indonesian painter who was trained as an artist in the Netherlands. After twenty-three years in Europe, Saleh returned home, where he painted The Arrest of Diponegoro. The painting depicts the surrender of the Javanese prince and freedom fighter Diponegoro to the Dutch. “Power & Other Things” has intentionally placed the work beside the painting The Submission by his Dutch contemporary Nicolaas Pieneman. The theme of the canvasses is the same, but the titles betray the profoundly different perspectives on these events.

“Power & Other Things” consistently contrasts the perspectives of the powerful and the subjugated, and shows how these different views affected the course of history. For example, a contemporary collective of scientists and artists juxtaposes a replica of the symbol of power of the Indonesian Batak people, which was stolen by a Dutchman at the end of the nineteenth century, with the oral transmission of the contemporary Batak about their ancestors who fought for it. The emblem of power ended up in the MAS (Museum aan de Stroom) in Antwerp, and the Batak abandoned their struggle against the colonists.

You see a dizzying cross-section of the enormous diversity on the archipelago, and how events from the present and past – in incredibly current themes like Islamization, racism, or the role of women – are intimately entwined.

> Power & Other Things. > 21/01, Bozar, Brussels