Jakarta Biennale

The Jakarta Biennale was founded in 1968 by the Dewan Kesenian Jakarta — the Jakarta Arts Council, established 1968 by Ali Sadikin, then Governor of Jakarta under President Suharto's recently-consolidated New Order regime — as an annual exhibition of Indonesian painting at the Taman Ismail Marzuki cultural complex. The founding was a Sukarno-to-Suharto transition-period cultural-policy event: the New Order regime had taken full power following the 30 September 1965 coup attempt and the 1965–66 anti-communist mass killings (in which between half a million and a million Indonesians were killed, the most catastrophic episode of Cold War political violence in Asia outside the Vietnam and Korean wars), and the new regime's reconstruction of Indonesian cultural infrastructure required, among else, a national-painting exhibition to substantiate the New Order's continuing cultural-modernisation argument. The biennial's institutional origin within the New Order's continuing post-1965 cultural-policy architecture is a historical fact that any reading of the biennial's continuing institutional position has to engage.

The founding editions — the 1st (1968), 2nd (1970), and subsequent annual-then-biennial editions across the 1970s and early 1980s — were national painting biennials operating under the New Order's continuing cultural-administrative supervision. The Indonesian painting traditions the biennial platformed — the Yogyakarta-school generation around Affandi, S. Sudjojono, Hendra Gunawan, and the Bandung-school generation around Mochtar Apin, Ahmad Sadali, and the post-1945 Indonesian modernist conversation — shaped the institutional readings of Indonesian modern and contemporary art across the New Order period. The biennial's continuing operation through the New Order period (1967–1998) is institutionally remarkable: many of the international contemporary biennials founded in the 1960s and 1970s (the Tokyo Biennale, the various short-lived Latin American biennials of the period) did not survive, and the Jakarta Biennale's continuing institutional position is distinct from every comparable institution of its founding period in Asia.

The 1998 reformasi — the democratic transition following Suharto's resignation in May 1998 — produced the institutional restructuring of the Jakarta Biennale across the post-2000 period. The biennial shifted away from the national-painting-exhibition format toward a multi-disciplinary contemporary art biennial engaging the post-reformasi Indonesian contemporary art conversation. The Indonesian contemporary art generation that emerged across the post-reformasi period — ruangrupa (founded 2000), Tromarama, Eko Nugroho, Heri Dono, FX Harsono, Jompet Kuswidananto, Mella Jaarsma, Tisna Sanjaya, Agus Suwage — reshaped the Jakarta Biennale across editions in the 2000s and 2010s. The Jakarta Biennale 2009 (ARENA, curated by Rifky Effendy and the curatorial team), the 2011 Jakarta Biennale (Maximum City: Survive or Escape!, curated by Suman Gopinath, Grace Samboh, Agung Hujatnikajennong, Reza Afisina, and Hafiz Rancajale), and the 2013 Jakarta Biennale (SIASAT, curated by ruangrupa) established the biennial's post-reformasi institutional position as one of the most curatorially-distinctive contemporary biennials in Southeast Asia.

The 2015 Jakarta Biennale (Neither Forward nor Back: Acting in the Present, curated by Charles Esche of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, with an Indonesian curatorial team including Ade Darmawan, Anwar Jimpe Rachman, Asep Topan, Benny Wicaksono, Putra Hidayatullah, and Riksa Afiaty) extended the biennial's international visibility while preserving the institutional argument that the biennial was an Indonesian-curated institution operating in international conversation rather than the reverse. The methodological work of the 2015 edition — its engagement with Indonesian and Southeast Asian historical-political memory — fed into the more institutionally consequential 2017 edition.

The 2017 Jakarta Biennale, JIWA (Soul), curated by ruangrupa with Melati Suryodarmo (Artistic Director), Hendro Wiyanto, Annissa Gultom, Philippe Pirotte, and Vít Havránek, is the most internationally consequential edition of the Jakarta Biennale in its more than fifty-year history. The curatorial method JIWA developed — a extension of ruangrupa's continuing collective-and-collaborative artistic practice into the institutional architecture of a major contemporary art biennial — was the institutional rehearsal for the lumbung (Indonesian for the communal rice-barn) methodology that ruangrupa subsequently took to documenta 15 (Kassel, 2022). The lumbung method — treating the biennial as a collective resource for collaborative artistic practice across the Global South, redistributing the institutional resources of the biennial form away from the curator-as-author model and toward a collective-and-collaborative resource-sharing model — was developed in the 2017 Jakarta Biennale and consolidated at documenta 15. The international art-world conversation about documenta 15 across 2022 and after read the Jakarta Biennale 2017 in retrospect as the institutional precursor.

The post-2017 period has produced the 2021 Jakarta Biennale (ESOK [Tomorrow], curated by an Indonesian curatorial team including Asep Topan, Putra Hidayatullah, and others), the 2023 edition (delayed from 2023 to 2024), and the 17th Jakarta Biennale (TITEN: Mengakar Pada Tanah, Mengalir Dalam Air — Rooted in Soil, Flowing in Water), which opened in October 2024. The biennial's continuing institutional argument across the post-reformasi period — that the Indonesian contemporary art conversation has the curatorial intelligence, the institutional infrastructure, and the generational depth to organise a major international biennial on its own terms — has won. Whether the post-2024 Indonesian state cultural-policy environment under the Prabowo Subianto government (inaugurated October 2024) will continue to support the biennial's continuing operation is the principal continuing institutional question.

The institutional architecture

The Jakarta Biennale is currently organised by the Yayasan Jakarta Biennale (Jakarta Biennale Foundation), a non-profit cultural foundation that restructured the biennial's continuing institutional architecture in the post-2000 period. Continuing institutional support comes from the Jakarta Provincial Government (the cultural-policy continuation of the founding 1968 Dewan Kesenian Jakarta), the Indonesian Ministry of Education, Culture, Research and Technology, and a private and international philanthropic base. The biennial operates through a continuing network of Jakarta cultural venues, with recurring use of the Taman Ismail Marzuki cultural complex (the founding venue, renovated 2021–2022), the Galeri Nasional Indonesia, the Museum Nasional Indonesia, the Jakarta Arts Building (Gedung Kesenian Jakarta), and a network of independent and partner venues across the city.