The Light of Spirit, installation view, plastic electric candles, LED bulbs, sand, cast cement, wood, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist.
Reminiscence presents the FX Harsono’s longstanding major project that investigates the genocide and mass graves of ethnic Chinese-Indonesians in Java, Indonesia from 1947 to 1949. Part documentary and part commemoration, the exhibition will see a new series of drawings alongside two major installations that confronts the truth of this history.
This project takes as its starting point, documentary photographs taken by the artist’s father in the 1950s. Later, he met some of the survivors and also visited the mass graveyard, experiences which precipitated his research into this dark period of Indonesia’s history. The victims and their families commemorate the event every year on the 5th of April, in a commemoration called Ching Ming. Since 2009, Harsono has been actively researching the little-known mass grave sites of ethnic Chinese-Indonesians; giving voice to those who cannot speak.
Episodes of violence and oppression against the country’s ethnic Chinese minority can be traced to even before the birth of Indonesian nationalism in the early 20th Century. Racial violence marked Indonesia’s transition from a Dutch colony to Japanese occupied territory and the subsequent Indonesian Revolution (1945-1949), considered to be one of the most violent eras in modern Indonesian history. To this day, this dark period of Indonesia’s history has remained largely obscured with no official acknowledgement or efforts to initiate reconciliation.
Opening: Saturday 25 August, 5—7pm
Venue: Sullivan+Strumpf, 5 Lock Road #01-06, Gillman Barracks, Singapore 108933
When: 25 Aug - 23 Sep 2018,
By: Sullivan+Strumpf
