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Cultural Amnesia
Tisna Sanjaya & Abdi Karya

14 February to 21 March 2026
The Cross Art Projects

In his artworks (etchings, paintings, installations), performances and social situations Tisna Sanjaya is unwavering in his attention to the political and environmental conditions in his home city of Bandung in West Java. This exhibition is Tisna Sanjaya’s first exhibition in Sydney. The exhibition comprises 10 prints from a series titled Portrait of ourselves as hypocrites and 10 recent paintings, including a work titled Cultural Amnesia, addressing forms of corruption and the hypocrisy that enables and masks its operation.

The intergenerational nature of Indonesian art practice is acknowledged by including a performance by Abdi Karya, a young Bugis artist and curator from Makassar in South Sulaweisi. Both Tisna and Abdi enlist cultural reclamation as way of sketching the close and distant outlines of power.

Tisna Sanjaya and his generation of artists, such as FX Harsono, Arahmaiani, Dadang Christanto and Heri Dono, have international reputations but their work is subtle enough to fly under the radar of local officials. In Australia, Tisna Sanjaya’s participatory work has been experienced at the State Library in Melbourne for AsiaTOPIA (2017) and viewed in installation form in Contemporary Worlds Indonesia (Australian National Gallery, 2019), a major survey of the post-Reformasi era of artistic practice and engagement with global issues.

In Tisna’s work, “the artist” is positioned as the autonomous centre of creative expression and, more subtly, as a figure able to adopt roles traditionally assigned to community leaders in Sundanese (West Javanese) culture. Alongside his exhibition and teaching work, since his student days in the 1980s, Tisna has performed jeprut, a Sundanese performance art sourced in a movement originating from Bandung. In 2007 he built a green cultural centre in one of Bandung’s polluted manufacturing and re-cycling suburbs and produced a popular television series where he plays the role of an innocent investigator of local controversies.

The ambiguity of Tisna’s artistic disciplines and the roles he plays free him to speak to diverse audiences and to shift viewpoints from a street corner performance in Sundanese to a survey of the quick platitudes of international textile and fast fashion corporations as they evade regulations. For example, his work at the pristine National Gallery of Singapore (2011), 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 in a world overwhelmed by consumption.

This exhibition Amnesia Cultura features works from Tisna’s series of large aquatints titled Portrait of Ourselves as Hypocrites, exhibited in Museum Macan, Jakarta (2018). The series comprises prints of the artist’s feet and hands juxtaposed with delicate sketches of trees, suggesting an organic connection between art, Islam and the natural environment. A painting in the exhibition carries the words ‘This machine fights fascists’, a quote adopted from the text on the guitar of the political folk singer Woodie Guthrie. The work recalls an earlier print series titled Amnesia Cultura comprising 14 large panels of the artist’s “body prints” painted in ash and charcoal, shown at the National Gallery in Jakarta in 2008. A reviewer called Amnesia Culture a portrait of “issues of repression, violence and hardships”. [FN Nafas Art Magazine, Universe in Universe.]

Outside galleries, in his popular television show, Si Kabayan Nyintreuk (Kabayan the Eccentric, 100 episodes or situations from 2007), Tisna played the Sundanese folk figure Si Kabayan who visited sites of environmental degradation, social disadvantage, or cultural events. On site Kabayan interviews a puppet theatre of poor and poorly represented residents, suspects, officials and politicians. Tisna presents Kabayan’s view as a rational perspective from which to critique irrational problems: poverty, urban blight, pollution and regular flooding and the decline of traditional practices and values that mitigate these issues.

Several 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. The Kabayan strategy engages both contemporary and traditional art forms as mediums to critique power and raise awareness.

Tisna Sanjaya’s other major project is Imah Budaya (Cultural Centre), known as IBU (or mother), a small pavilion in Bandung’s industrial suburb of Cigondewah, initiated by exchanging his artworks for land. The aims of this “site-as-artwork” project were the subject of Sanjaya’s PhD thesis at the Indonesian Fine Arts Institute (ISI), Yogyakarta. IBU is an unpredictable space for theatre, education, cautious encounter, and often bafflement. Building a space is unremarkable in an Indonesian context of ‘gotong royong’, the cultural concept rooted in ancient customs of the Malay Archipelago, where collaborative efforts symbolise the collective spirit of cultural identity, except for the effect the venue has created. It is now a pillar of decentralised conceptual art practice.

In location in Cigondewah the various overlapping artistic scenes and research 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. Some members of the global waste industry pay (or bribe) developing countries facing poverty to take their waste and endure subsequent poisoning. Despite the efforts of farmers and activists such as Tisna, 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 re-cycling warehouses. The memory of the paddy fields has faded from collective memory.

Behind IBU is a fast-moving canal that feeds into the Cikapundung river where the young Tisna and his friends once swam and played. Imah Budaya is a rare green space in an industrial area. It has a waterwheel drawing up water from a now toxic river to purify for irrigation. The Cikapundung flows down from the mountains of Bandung into the Citarum River that waters one of Indonesia’s rice bowls. Downstream and upstream, paddy fields are now surrounded by textile factories that empty toxic waste into the river. Downstream the factories are vast and formidably secretive.

In ARTJOG 2014 and ARTJOG 2025 in Yogyakarta, Tisna’s installations documented performances relating to the Cikapundung river, aiming to draw attention to the failure to protect waterways. The river divides Bandung, as it flows from its headwaters in Lembang on the northern edge of the city, to the south, where it empties into the Citarum River. Despite being one of the main sources of Bandung’s water supply, the river is heavily polluted.

For ARTJOG 2025, the artist installed a traditional waterwheel, 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.

The Citarum River is the second most polluted river globally. Here, over 2,000 textile factories discharge untreated wastewater containing synthetic dyes and chemical finishing agents directly into the river and across rice paddy water irrigation systems. The 20 million people dependent on the Citarum River face cancer risks and developmental disorders from exposure to heavy metals and diminishing and contaminated rice yields. Meanwhile, we shop at culprits like Uniclo (Japan) and H&M (Sweden) for cheap trends.

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 is, the people not a country’s political and industrial elite. [Kent, op sit, p. 117.] For Tisna, the linking of performance, theatre and etching are a formwork for socially engaged practice. He returned to lecture at the Institute of Technology Bandung (ITB), Indonesia’s key conceptual art school. 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 art centres played the same critical role with artworkers delivering food and materials.

Tisna’s artist colleague, FX Harsano remarks, “Almost all reform artists undertake some work outside their individual creative practices. Of course, they cannot live from their art alone … (but) the awareness is that the act of earning a living and creating art form an inseparable unit”. [Kent, op sit, p. 128.]

Tisna Sanjaya, Untitled (Percakapan dengan Diponogora), 2023, mixed media on canvas, 120 x 100 cm