Next
Cultural Amnesia
Tisna Sanjaya
Opening Saturday 21 February, 2 pm
With opening performance by Tisna Sanjaya and Acknowledgement of Country by Djon Mundine OAM
Public Conversation Saturday 14 March, 2 pm
With Tisna Sanjaya and Dr Elly Kent
Exhibition runs 21 February to 28 March 2026
The Cross Art Projects
Tisna Sanjaya’s artworks (etchings, paintings, installations), performances and social situations, are unwavering in their attention to the political and environmental conditions in his home city of Bandung in West Java and the world at large. This is Tisna’s first exhibition in Sydney.
Cultural Amnesia presents Tisna’s dramatic recent paintings addressing the legacy of systemic corruption and genocide inherited from Indonesia’s 32 years of New Order military dictatorship. Mostly painted in dark tones suggestive of ash and tar and dense with images and figures drawn from Sundanese (West Javanese) art traditions, the works are sombre portraits of the cultural amnesia of the Era Reformasi that followed.
Alongside the paintings are works selected from a series titled Portrait of Ourselves as Hypocrites, large aquatints exhibited in Museum MACAN, Jakarta (2018) and expanded for National Gallery of Indonesia the following year. The series comprises prints of the artist’s feet and hands juxtaposed with delicate sketches of trees, suggesting a connection between art, prayer, and the natural environment counterposed with eerie masks.
For Sydney, Tisna has made a new work titled Art as a Prayer for Change. Here the gallery is transformed into a set where the paintings and prints are cast as witnesses to the scars of a dictatorship and the legacy of rigged elections, restrictions on freedom of association and expression and violent crackdowns on separatist movements in Aceh, Timor-Leste ad West Papua, that continued into the new democratic era.
In the performance, the artist washes 27 pieces of clothing as a metaphor for the years of Reformasi where, under a new Constitution respecting democracy and human rights, corruption became more subtle as did repression and re-naming. This symbolic act exposes and cleanses the inheritance of false history. Each finished garment, painted with satirical images and portraits, is then hung out to dry. The water drains onto the floor, emphasising the recurring process of dirt, cleanliness, and the maintenance of shared space.
The artist says, “This work positions art as a prayer for change—a satirical practice that seeks to “cleanse” history of falsehood, while questioning collective memory, nationalism, and commemorative rituals that often lose their meaning.”
Indonesian artists famously contributed to the declaration of independence after the Second World War (August 1945), and later focused resistance to the Suharto regime. Tisna’s installation leaves hanging the proposition that the spectre of dictatorship and fascism lingers, always seeking to return cleansed and reborn — anywhere, anytime.
Many Indonesian artists continue to campaign for art beyond aesthetics often combining tradition, avant-garde conceptual legacies, and documentary rigour. This decisive legacy has honed their contributions to the Asia Pacific Triennale in Brisbane while their magisterial contribution to contemporary art is acknowledged in curatorial initiatives such as Contemporary Worlds Indonesia at National Gallery of Australia (2019), a survey of the post-Reformasi era.
Tisna positions the artist as a shape shifter or storyteller who can adopt roles traditionally assigned to community leaders in Sundanese culture. Perceptive writers on Tisna’s work, such as Elly Kent in her ground-breaking book, Artists and the People: Ideologies of Art in Indonesia (2022), note a similarity between the artist’s personality and that of the ancient Sundanese folk figure of Kabayan, whose stories are considered funny and humble, but also smart.
Tisna produced a wildly successful television series Si Kabayan Nyintreuk / Kabayan the Eccentric (100 episodes or situations from 2007). In the series he plays Kabayan the innocent investigator of local controversies who interviews a puppet theatre of poor and poorly represented residents, suspects, officials and politicians. Kabayan’s eccentric viewpoint is presented as a rational critique of irrational problems: poverty, urban blight, pollution and regular flooding and the decline of traditional practices and values that mitigate these issues. Kabayan’s intervention, for example, helped the movement to protect the Bandung Urban Forest, a unique urban respite and meeting place, from development.
The vast scope and ambiguity of Tisna’s artistic disciplines engages diverse audiences from a local street corner performance to major gallery installations. His work at the pristine National Gallery of Singapore (2011), for example, comprised re-exported tons of plastic waste. The waste dump offered a satirical portrait of the colonial idealisation of the Mooi Indie (the Dutch colonial term for Beautiful Indies) and a startling portrait of disparities in living conditions.
Another of Tisna’s major projects is Imah Budaya (Cultural Centre), known as IBU or mother, a traditional pavilion set in Bandung’s industrial and recycling suburb of Cigondewah, a project initiated by exchanging his artworks for land. IBU is an unpredictable space for theatre, music, education, and cautious encounter. In an Indonesian context of ‘gotong royong’, the cultural concept rooted in ancient collaborative customs and rituals of the Malay Archipelago, such a space is not unusual, except for the effect the venue has created. IBU is now a pillar of decentralised conceptual art practice.
In Cigondewah the various overlapping artistic scenes and research efforts strategically co-exist within a global context of the waste wars where firms make vast amounts of money sending the rich world’s waste to the global South. The catastrophe has escalated and ever more waste is diverted to Indonesia and Malaysia from unapologetic culprits like Australia, to end up as landfill. On the margins of this vast and profitable economy, former farmers work as rag-sorters after having sold their land to textile factories and recycling warehouses. The memory of the paddy fields and sacred waters, where Tisna grew up, has faded from collective memory.
Behind IBU is a fast-moving canal that feeds into the Cikapundung River. At IBU a waterwheel draws up water from a now toxic canal to purify for a small garden. The Cikapundung flows down from the mountains of Bandung into the Citarum River, the second most polluted river globally. Over 2000 textile factories empty toxic waste containing synthetic dyes and chemical finishing agents directly into the river. The 20 million people dependent on the river face cancer risks and developmental disorders and diminishing and contaminated rice yields. The culprits are familiar names for cheap trends like UNIQLO (Japan) and H&M (Sweden).
In ARTJOG 2014 and ARTJOG 2025 held at Yogyakarta National Museum, Tisna’s installations and audience-led performance recounted the failure to protect waterways. For ARTJOG 2025, the artist installed a waterwheel, as at IBU, set in motion by a bicycle ridden by visitors to the popular exhibition. The hand-made object and the provisional nature of the art event spoke to the slow-going work of activists and of disproportionate resources. The peddling-event symbolically transferred people powered energy to the Herculean task of regulating offenders and rehabilitating the river.
Art is of course more than just art. Kent calls these art practices an “engagement with principles of democracy and citizenship by exposing the absence of these principles in the lives of the rakyat.” Rakyat or ‘the people’ are not the country’s political and industrial elite. Understanding of the Indonesian contribution to post-colonial democratic ideals has been rapidly growing. At Documenta Fifteen in Kassel (2022) under the artistic direction of ruangrupa— the Jakarta-based artist-led education collective introduced a curatorial system they called the lumbung (rice barn) model, which focuses on collective resource sharing, a system analogous to Tisna’s waterwheel curatorial system and many others in Indonesia. Here too Tisna made an individual performance as a member of Jatiwangi art Factory (JaF). These collectivist art practices somewhat startled the first world.
For Tisna, the linking of performance, theatre and etching are a formwork for socially engaged practice. He returned from Masters study in Germany in the late 1990’s to lecture at the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), Indonesia’s key conceptual art school and complete his Doctorate at Indonesian Institute of the Arts Yogyakarta (known as ISI). During a time of crisis, Sanjaya’s response to the Covid pandemic was to trigger inspiration of art’s role in communities by giving out food packages in Bandung. In Australia many remote Indigenous art centres played the same critical role with artworkers delivering food and materials.
__
Jo Holder
Director, The Cross Art Projects
Tisna Sanjaya, Makan Siang Gratis, mixed media on canvas, 200 x 200 cm
Tisna Sanjaya, Untitled, mixed media on canvas, 200 x 200 cm
Tisna Sanjaya, Untitled, 2023, mixed media on canvas, 200 x 150 cm
Tisna Sanjaya, Etik Ndasmu, 2024, mixed media on canvas, 200 x 150 cm
Tisna Sanjaya, Untitled (Percakapan dengan Diponogora), 2023, mixed media on canvas, 120 x 100 cm
Tisna Sanjaya, Untitled, mixed media on canvas, 120 x 100 cm
Tisna Sanjaya, Untitled, 2024, mixed media on canvas, 80 x 70 cm
Tisna Sanjaya, Untitled, mixed media on canvas, 60 x 50 cm
Tisna Sanjaya
Selected Exhibitions
1982 Exhibition of drawings along the sidewalk everyday Cikapundung Road East, London.
1988 Graphic Art Exhibition of etching and lithography at the Gallery Soemardja Bandung. Jakarta Arts Institute and Gallery.
1991 Graphic Art Exhibition of etching and lithography Goethe Institute Gottingen, Germany.
1993 Exhibition of Graphic Art, Image and Performance Art in the Gallery Bruecke , Braunschweig, Germany.
1995 Etching 1995 Art Exhibition at Gallery Cemeti, Yogyakarta.
1996 “Installation Grows” 1999 Mahogany tree planting and tree Melinjo in Bandung, Solo and Surabaya.
1998 Graphic Art Exhibition at Gallery Lontar, Jakarta.
1999 “Thinking With the knee” at the Arts Center Foundation Building in Bandung and the French Cultural Centre, Bandung.
2000 Installation and Performance Art “Art and Football for Peace” Art Market gallery Cemeti ITB Bandung and Yogyakarta.
2003 Installation and Performance Art “Special Supplication For The Dead” in Lontar Gallery, Jakarta.
2004 Installation and Graphic Arts at Bentara Budaya Jakarta.
2006 Exhibition at the Gallery of Graphic Arts Santrian Denpasar, Bali.
2007 “Sunset in Cigondewah” in Building Foundation Cultural Center, Bandung.
2008 “Incarnation” in ArtSphere, Jakarta
2008 “Cigondewah” at Gallery Kendra, Bali
2008 “Ideocrazy” at the National Gallery Jakarta
2011 “Cigondewah Projeckt of Art” at the Museum National University of Singapore.
2012 In collaboration with Greenpeace, he created the work “Pelangi Citarum” by painting on the riverbank and in the middle of a small island in Cigebar.
2013 Exhibited the work “Embassy of World Problems” at the Singapore Biennale 2013: If the World Changed.
2013 Together with artists and cultural figures, successfully fought for the revocation of the commercialization permit for the Babakan Siliwangi city forest.
2013 Exhibited “I Like Kapital, Kapital Likes Me” at Art Stage Singapore.
2015 Exhibited/performed “Rumah IBU (Imah Budaya)” at Jakarta Biennale 2015.
2016 “The Ash Cycle” at the Dutch Cultrual Center, Erasmus Huis, Jakarta.
2017 “Art is a Prayer” at Asia TOPA: Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts, Melbourne Library.
2017 “Potret Diri Sebagai Kaum Munafik” (Portrait of Ourselves as Hypocrites)” at First Sight, Museum MACAN.
2018 “99 Red Prayer Mats’ at M+ Museum, Hong Kong.
2018 “Potret Diri Sebagai Kaum Munafik” (Portrait of Ourselves as Hypocrites)” at National Gallery of Indonesia.
2019 “Seni penjernih dialog (Art as purifying dialogue)” at National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, commissioned for Contemporary Worlds: Indonesia 2019.
2019 “Visit Indonesian Years” at Dunia Dalam Berita (World in News) exhibition, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara (Museum MACAN).
2020 “Dian Lentera Budaya” at Bioskop Dian, Bandung.
2021 “Organic Football Stadium” performance at Triennale Teracotta Jatiwangi, West Java
2022 Solo performance as a member of Jatiwangi art Factory (JaF) collective in Documenta15, Kassel, Germany
2023 “Greed/ Rakus/ Gierig” performance and installation “99 bodyprints” at Dark Mofo, Hobart, Tasmania
2023 Residency + installation in “What is Prayer?” exhibition at Komunitas Salihara Arts Centre, South Jakarta
2024 “Ganjel” installation in Art Jakarta 2024, Jakarta, Indonesia
2024 “Suatu Ketika di Taman Mia” installation in “Tjoekoep, Tjoekoep, Tjoekoep!”, Galerie R.J. Katamsi, Indonesia
2025 Participant in ARTJOG 2025, Jogja National Museum, Yogyakarta, Indonesia.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Tisna Sanjaya and the support of Project11 (Konfir Kabo and Mara Sison) and 16 Albermarle (John Cruthers) in promoting understanding of contemporary art from the Indonesian archipelago. Special thanks to special guest Elly Kent and sound recordist Iain Wilson. Assistance at The Cross Art Projects: Belle Blau, Reiana Aramoana and Phillip Boulten. Thanks also to artist Zico Albaiquni and curator Asep Topan for assistance.
You may also wish to view the exhibition by Zico Albaiquni (Son of Tisna Sanjaya), The Land that Refuses to be Beautiful, at Yavuz Gallery in Surry Hills until 21 February 2026.
