Kartika - For the Love of Life

KA rt I ka

Kartika

For the Love of Life

KA rt I ka FOR THE LOVE OF LIFE

BARNEY AGERBEEK

Colophon

ISBN 9789460229602

© 2024 LM Publishers, Edam, the Netherlands

Author: Barney Agerbeek

Graphic Design: Jan van Waarden (ram vormgeving)

Photography: Felix Dharma Yudhi, Dissa Aruna, Makalingga, David Agerbeek

Translators: Scott Rollins, Barney Agerbeek

Production: High Trade BV

KA

KA rt I kaIntroduction

Kartika Affandi

Remarkable, Irrepressible Mistress of Paint

by

astri wright

As the first scholar to have written in-depth about this artist’s work in English or probably any language, it is a pleasure to write this introductory essay to Barney Agerbeek’s biography about Kartika Affandi. A book such as this is well overdue. It is lucky indeed that the timing was just right for this collaboration between Agerbeek and Kartika. With this publication, based on Agerbeek’s intensive oral history research over the last couple of years, new light and further insight is shed on one of the great figures in modern Indonesian art.

I have had the great fortune to meet remarkable people in many parts of the world. Many of them have been artists. Most of them were until recent decades completely unknown in the West, whether in galleries, museums, or the art history curriculum. Even into the 1990s, we heard nothing about the world’s modern and contemporary artists beyond the European-settled cultures (the ‘West’) in European and American universities.

From elementary school on up through university years, I was always guided by a strong curiosity towards what I wasn’t learning. And I did not trust that the frameworks my teachers presented us with were comprehensive. My world-awareness had, after all, been growing since I was only a year old, when my parents and I began travelling the world by oceangoing liners, for work, study and family visits. Keeping my eyes open while studying at the Central Academy of Art in Beijing in the early 1980s and visiting Indonesia for the first time a few years later, I saw art and artists not represented in any of the books or courses I took, even at some of the best universities in the world.

This void in the western knowledge base, which constituted an erasure of artists living in nations less known in (and most of them formerly colonized by) European nations, led to my decision to focus on contemporary art in China and Southeast Asia, with my PhD focus on Indonesia. Inspired by one forerunner & mentor who had preceded me to research Indonesian art five decades before me, and who published the only written work in English on twenty years earlier, in 1967 (I am here of course referring to Claire Holt), and guided by my own eyes anchored in the faith that Indonesians themselves would teach me during my research, I arrived in Yogya in the autumn of 1987.

And so it came to be that I met Affandi, Maryati, and Kartika at the Affandi Museum by the Gajah Wong River in Yogyakarta. I had ‘met’ Affandi through Holt’s writing. I had never heard of Affandi’s wife Maryati, a woman and artist working in media not considered ‘contemporary art’ by Western(-ized) art-/knowledgebrokers.

To my mind, the elder-couple presided at the Affandi museum in their respective and shared spaces like demi-gods, walking the later parts of their intertwined paths, ripe in worldly wisdom and humor. Their lives were steeped in first-hand experience of revolution, nation-building and massive change, things I had only read about.

Kartika, whose name I had barely registered when reading Holt, was closer to me in age (a mere two plus decades older, yet age-less in her energy and openness to the world). With her open-armed, open-hearted approach to people, and perhaps especially those interested in her family’s art, she broke through my shyness, began to alleviate my ignorance, and quickly became one of the treasured people who have so greatly enriched my life and work as well as the world around them.

Artist and Institution Builder

Kartika asked me to write a more personal essay for this book. I have offered art history analysis of her work elsewhere. Because she lived in Yogya where I was based during my PhD research, and because of her personality, I got to know Kartika better than many of the other 70 artists I was fortunate to interview for my 1991 dissertation and 1994 book. Because of her pioneering a psychologically expressive, non-idealized self-portraiture, which differed from the art of anyone else in Indonesia and also stood out from the generally show-cased art by women, I made Kartika the focus of a case-study chapter in my book. My discussion of Kartika’s life and work was preceded by an explorative analysis of the gender roles of women in historical and more recent times in Java in relation to contemporary artists.

In Indonesia, Kartika is art world royalty, the head of the Affandi dynasty. This matriarch, whose children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are legion, is also an astute administrator. Over the last twenty-five years, she organized the Affandi museum into a true artist family’s show-case, had new buildings built, undertook conservation of the art works and began archiving materials, all the while training family members to participate and eventually take over. And all the time she was intensively involved with this work, she was building the legacy of her father and arranging events for young artists at the museum. Over the last decade plus, she began to build her Women’s Museum just outside of Yogyakarta. Whenever she could, she took time off to paint, sometimes during travel in her van or abroad.

I had the privilege of accompanying her on one such painting trip. Watching Kartika set up and begin to paint on the beach at Pasir Putih in 1988, I was seated to her left with my own canvas and tubes. I was ready to embark on some ‘participant observation’ research. I watched her squeeze the colors from the tubes and mix them on her wrist, before painting with her fingers. I absorbed her embodied art practice so completely that, despite being right-handed, I finished my painting using my left hand, painted in a style located half-way between the more restrained way I paint and Kartika’s energetic style.

Watching how Kartika interacted so naturally and like equals with the old fisherman who owned the boat she was painting, and with passersby who made disparaging comments about her

10

Kartika, for the love of life

lack of painting skill, hearing her sudden laughter cut through the heat like the delighted screeches of a (somewhat mildvoiced) parrot, I began to understand how interested Kartika is in people of many varied circumstances. This is also evident in her portraits of people she has painted, which include indigenous people in the humid jungles of Irian Jaiya, the desert of Australia and the snows of Austria.

Having grown up in a highly stratified society (which also had recently bathed in the discourse of revolution and new political parties and processes), Kartika shows little sense of her own hard-earned privilege or importance. She is humble but open.

You see this reflected in her art, whatever the subject. With her artist’s vision, she sees beyond the surface differences to the common core of humanity. She is not stuck on location, look, vocation or class. She is a border- and ocean-crosser, who surfs on the energy-waves of heart and humor to connect. When humor isn’t enough, she connects through sheer nurturing, respectful, deep seeing of individuals and groups. This is what she brings when she goes to paint in disaster zones, places destroyed by flood or earth-quake, to raise awareness and money for food, medicine and reconstruction. Where Kartika (who has star-status in Indonesian media) goes, many of the wealthy classes follow.

In such situations, her personal presence is the equal gift: no one is invisible to her. This ability seems both natural and honed and fits the age-old ideal held alive in Asia longer than in the western-industrialized world, that a person, in order to be truly great, must also have refined their soul and psyche to a high level.

In Javanese spiritual practices, from indigenous to Hindu-Buddhist to Islamic, the ideas of humility, selflessness and service are strong. Though perhaps eroding in the current materialist turn, Kartika upholds these values quite unselfconsciously. This has allowed her to paint people all over the world with warmth and compassion, skirting close to (but, in my opinion, not crossing) the line which separates her from ‘objectifying the other’. Connecting across gaps with a generosity of spirit is what is important to Kartika; being politically cautious and correct is not.

These qualities are also reflected in the larger body of her art, which feature portraits of people other than herself, as well as the numerically largest part of her oeuvre: her genre scenes, of nature, animal and villages. Kartika has a great compassion for all

living beings and forms, not just humans: animals and natural features are also a big part of her oeuvre. Pigs, dogs, goats and cattle are featured regularly, either as the main subject or as part of a village scene. One of my favorites is of a tethered Brahmin or Cebu bull, painted in the early 1990s, a subject she painted many times. While Affandi painted the energy and cruelty of cock fights over many decades, Kartika focuses more on the mammals and the suffering they sustain at human hands.

The intensity and quality of the hours I have spent with Kartika over a thirty-year span remain forever memorable. Memory glimpses flash by like a well-edited video, carried by a sound track of kecapi suling (flute) and anklung (bamboo tubes creating different notes) for the Affandi family’s Sundanese heritage, and gamelan for their Central Javanese and Balinese roots, with dalang and sinden vocals weaving in and out.

Kartika’s and my friendship and professional working relationship encompass many varied dimensions. Together, we have spent hours digging into her art’s trajectory, facets and meaning in the context of her life and modern art in Indonesia. We have collaborated around bringing the work of Indonesian women artists to the fore, against the backdrop of changing social roles in history and in contemporary times. We have discussed museum business, art world events and actors, and women’s art galleries and venues around the world. We have fought some of the many battles she has to undertake against the forgeries of Indonesian masters, side by side, as well as separately. This is a battle Kartika is never free of, as the forgeries of her father’s work become ever more plentiful, both in art collections and in publications.

In 2007, we celebrated the Centennial of her father’s birth, with the publication of a book for which she was a major informant and facilitator. Together with the Affandi book’s publishing crew, we watched the wayang Kartika organized for her father’s memory, featuring a wonderful wayang puppet portrait of him. And we shared a selamatan, eating a wildly wonderful spun-sugar desert, created (by the star chef at the Amanjiwo resort overlooking the Borobudur temple) in memory of Affandi: it was a nearlyrealistic portrait of his hair.

So much of Kartika’s efforts have revolved around being not only a filial daughter but the gardener of her father’s legacy. Some have interpreted this as her not being able to separate herself from her father. In fact, she has often portrayed herself both in paint and sculptural relief as part of both her mother and her father; more often, she has painted herself on her own, or with an animal, in a variety of emotional states. Her approach, here, follows a ‘both-and’ approach, with a focus on both the individual and her family connections. This may be a different pattern than the more individualist male artists’ one. But difference and diversity does not have to negate unity; the whole and the focus can be

kaleidoscopic, if one removes the lenses that are too narrow and too foreign to the subject-matter.

Kartika also does tend to her own legacy, however, both as a human being and as an artist. In 2013, we sat in her sun-drenched studio off her bedroom in her salvaged, antique wood-carved Javanese house. Next to us was a life-size (plastic) skeleton she had recently painted with her grand-children and dressed up in her hats and scarves. We were both tickled by its pop-art / Mexican Day of the Dead theatricality. Later, she showed me the rectangular hole in the garden of the smaller house she was going to be moving into, just up the hill: this was to be her grave. She seemed to be preparing her grandchildren, family and perhaps also herself, by bridging the practical and the existential, joking about it while preparing for that most serious event of all: death.

Kartika’s many relationships span great leaps in geography. From Yogyakarta, Pakem and Kaliurang, in the foothills of Mount Merapi in Central Java, to Pasir Putih in East Java and Jakarta in West Java; and from Bali to Berkeley; Kartika and I have met, embraced, shared, laughed, painted and worked together. This richly colored map is not nearly as far and wide as Kartika has traveled to taste, paint, and interact with the world’s landscapes, animals and people. It is also not as extensive as my own geography of experience. But it is one of the rich maps etched in my heart.

Like so many people, I could write a film script about my Kartika memories; and, indeed, Kartika has captured the attention and fondness of journalists, film-makers, writers, and others, both at home and abroad. Here, I will concentrate on some of my more personal memories of Kartika. To me, the personal and the professional are always most fruitful when naturally and effortlessly intertwined.

Some of my memory moments include: In 1987, soon after I had met her, Kartika showed up at my small rented house in Kledokan with her carpenter, to measure my room for the solid bamboo bed she then had built for me. I was sad to leave it behind when I left Indonesia, but Kartika and others were demonstrating to me the practice of letting go. In 1988, I swam in her tiny pool, beautifully shaped in concrete to resemble a natural tropical pond, at her home in Pakem. I was beginning to see the degree to which Kartika most brilliantly combines nature and artifice into elegant, creatively appointed homes set in paradiselike gardens. I ate brown rice Kartika had bought at the bird market (where dogs, snakes and cats were also sold), since this was the only place where it could be bought in the late 1980s. On the same visit, I was awoken in the middle of the night by the heartstopping sight of a fist-size hairy spider scratching out of the thatch wall way too close to my face. This was a spider Kartika ‘knew’; she had let it be there, as a natural part of her jungle habitat, trusting it wouldn’t hurt anyone.

By the time I left Indonesia in 1989, I was in awe at how Kartika had survived the pain of unfaithfulness by two husbands and the rejection of society of her own free artist’s life-choices. Hearing her tell how she used old spiritual techniques of cleansing and meditation accompanied by the elements (night, moonlight, star-light, water, prayer) to heal herself, I learned important life lessons.

My heart almost stopped a second time when, visiting in 1994, I discovered that while I was talking with Kartika, my five-year old daughter Ariel had taken a black marker and drawn a thick zig-zagging border around the portrait Kartika has just painted of her. My child had defaced the work of one of Indonesia’s foremost artists! I was mortified. But Kartika just leaned her head back and laughed her hearty, throaty, infectious laugh, and soon we were all laughing. She, who loves kids and spontaneity and does not hold to hierarchies, made this into a delightful moment of artistic collaboration.

Portrait of Ariel 1994

I saw another side of her love for the colorful, her lack of pretense and her honoring of people above status, when we were to meet for a meal in Jakarta in 1996. I expected the address of a restaurant, possibly in one of the large hotels. But no, she took me and my six-month old baby Taliya and my student assistant, Thai, to a tiny warung which she had patronized with her parents for at least three or four decades.

I was and am still amazed at this woman who so easily lives both her material and as her archetypal realities, all the while bringing forth both her artistic and her bio-social legacies, with such flair. In addition to being an artist of great breadth and scope and unusual experimental daring, who taught me a lot about contemporary art’s deep psycho-social underpinnings, Kartika also became a loving older-sister figure to me. Sometimes exhibiting her spiritual warrior archetype, she often slips into a more motherly role, or the roles of patroness and protector in a new culture to foreigners. Having been a foreigner herself many

Kartika, for the love of life

Kartika and Astri Wright, 1996

times, and loving to share of her own rich home culture, she was and is always alert to making outsiders feel at home. Her warrior self and deep sense of justice made her undertake fierce battles for women’s equality before the law. At the same time, she continuously sought the freedom to be true to herself, and at the same time. She undertook these struggles while keeping in mind the higher principle of walking that narrow path between resignation and defeat and anger and bitterness. Kartika has worked on her own psycho-spiritual make-up, within, while combating injustice, without.

Kartika and Astri Wright, 2013

Into the Limelight

It is not a given that an artist receives widespread attention and success in their lifetime. So many of our best known names today are recognized well after they have passed on. The documented artist-examples of this are legion in western art history, but barely known in the west, for artists from Asia (or Africa, or South America). In May – Aug 2017, the British Museum hosted Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave, a huge retrospective exhibition of the work of Hokusai, who along with other Japanese print makers was such an important influence in the development of western modernism. It took over a century and a half before this brilliant and influential artist was show-cased in such a comprehensive manner outside of Japan. As a side-note, here, I think that as art historians come to understand more fully the ways Hokusai (and earlier traditions of Chinese and Japanese painting) inspired styles of expression we now associate with cartoons, animation and manga, I believe Kartika’s more playfully shaped work will receive the recognition it deserves.

For the sixty-plus years of Kartika being active as an adult painter in the Indonesian art world, Kartika has remained mostly in the shadow of her artist-father in Indonesia’s official and market-driven art world. The other factor is how, at least up until the early 1990s, women artists were mostly sidelined or ghettoized into ‘ladies exhibitions’ by the Indonesian curators, critics, gallery-owners and collectors. As one of the two American members of the bi-national curatorial team which organized the modern exhibition for the Festival of Indonesia in the USA , I had to fight to have a handful of women artists included in the exhibition of around 70 artists; this was an apparently novel idea (see Fisher 1990). Meanwhile, Kartika (and a handful of others) has garnered respect and interest abroad, exhibiting a rift between Indonesian and foreign curatorial and art historical values.

Many astrologers say we have entered the Age of Aquarius, when attention to the well-being of the world as a whole, with every being in it, comes to the fore. It is also the Age of Kartika, it would seem, and the two are a good fit, both in terms of their qualities and in term of becoming more visible in the world.

A great artist teaches us about being more fully orchestrated as human beings. Kartika has dared to walk her own personal truth, at times against the grain of social or artistic convention. She breaks the normative boundaries of so many roles that can be

imposed on a person, anywhere in the world, and in its specific local forms, in Java and Indonesia. Yet at the same time, she also reflects into the world powerful female role models and archetypes from local history, sociology and lore.

Over the last few years, this octogenarian artist has suddenly garnered renewed interest from many quarters: among other things, a book is being written about her in Germany, a thesis is being written about her in Singapore, and a major retrospective exhibition focusing on her genre painting is being planned for the National Gallery in Jakarta. It is on the growing wave that a book like the current one is important. It will contribute towards filling one of the voids in the modern art history publications of Indonesia, published privately for the most part by collectors and galleries and individual artists in Indonesia, in the absence of national or university art history publishing programs, and will match the small number of publications written abroad by outsider scholars. The personal stories and perspectives offered in this book, written and edited by Agerbeek who has decades of experience working with art in both the Netherlands and Indonesia, will help to fill out the picture of this remarkable artist’s work and life.

Kartika has a large and colorful heart and soul. Her art, I would argue, is not limited to canvas, clay or fiberglass, but is an art of Life. Nature and people, images and plants, thrive around her. She walks on morality’s knife’s edges and balances on sharp volcanic rock. At the same time, she paints genre scenes of bucolic village scenes and expressive portraits of poverty, blindness, and suffering. She is not afraid of the destructive power of the volcano; she seems to have learned to harness it. Like Parvati in Hindu mythology, Kartika is a Daughter of the Mountain, with all the symbolism of inner and outer power and leadership and spiritual attainment pertaining to that monumental feature of the natural landscape. Like all who dance the spiritual idioms in Java, the mountain is celebrated both for its exterior and its interior: the peak is where one reaches closest to the gods and ancestors,

i.e. higher wisdom, and the cave is where one goes to meditate, known in ancient indigenous, Hindu, and Buddhist symbolism as the womb-space. Kartika offers views of the emerging, birthing and rebirthing, from that womb-space.

It is no surprise that she lives on the slopes of Yogyakarta’s active volcano, Mt Merapi. Gunung – the word for mountain in Indonesian – is also the name of the wayang shadow puppet that represents that confluence of meanings between the axis of the universe and the very shape of the cosmos itself. Kartika, then, lives that largest of archetypes – as a daughter of the Cosmos, in touch with the pulse of consciousness based on both mind and heart. Living also near that human-made mountain, the 9th C. Borobudur, it all just fits. The past in the ever-morphing present. Kartika is a woman in the right place. And her time is now.

Kartika, for the love of life

Bibliography

Arbuckle, Heidi, ‘Performing Emiria Sunassa: Reframing the Female Subjec’ in Post/colonial Indonesia. University of Melbourne, Asia Institute and the Department of History, Gender Studies, 2012.

Bianpoen, Carla, with Farah Wardani and Wulan Dirgantoro, Indonesian Women Artists: The Curtain Opens. Jakarta: Yayasan Senirupa Indonesia, 2007.

Fischer, Joseph (Ed.), Modern Indonesian art: three generations of tradition and change, 1945-1990. Berkeley, CA: J. Fischer, 1990.

Holt, Claire, Art in Indonesia: Continuities and Change. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967.

Spanjaard, Helena, ‘Javanese Tradition, a Prettified Cage’, in Framing Indonesian Realities: Essays in symbolic anthropology in honor of Reimar Schefold, KITLV Press, Leiden, 2003, p 133-160.

Wright, Astri, Soul, Spirit and Mountain: Preoccupations of Contemporary Indonesian Painters. Kuala Lumpur, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994

(This is based on the 1991 Cornell University PhD dissertation of the same name, which also included a section on collecting Modern Indonesian Art not included in the book. The book was edited and updated to include later material than the 1991 dissertation).

‘Selftaught Against the Grain: Three Artists and a Writer,’ in Flaudette May Datuin (Ed.), Women Imaging Women: Home, Body, Memory. Manila: University of the Philippines Department of Art Studies, the Ford Foundation Manila, and the Cultural Center of the Philippines, 1999 pp.118-154

‘Affandi in the Americas: Bridging the Gaps with Paint and Personality,’ in Sardjana Sumichan (Ed.), Affandi 2007. 3 Volumes. Jakarta / Singapore: Bina Lestari Foundation and the Singapore Art Museum, Vol.1, pp. 134-199.

Note: This paper is available at: https://www.academia.edu/3795280/Astri_Wright_Affandi_in_th e_Americas_Bridging_the_Gaps_with_Paint_and_Personality_Sa rdjana_Sumichan_Affandi_2007_

KA rt I ka

Chapter One Omahe Kartika

Omahe Kartika means ‘House of Kartika’ in Javanese, and is situated on a nameless country road, in danger zone three, so within reach of the Merapi volcano breathing down her neck. Despite the danger the location also has its advantages: because of the periodic eruptions the earth is extremely fertile.

The rural character has not been affected since hardly any building takes place. And naturally the view dominates everything. The Merapi appears at the crack of dawn, before being shrouded in clouds later in the morning, then looming majestically into sight from time to time.

Along the road lie sawahs (rice fields) and houses that are spread far apart, most of which are built in traditional styles.

The uncommon variety of black rice is cultivated at a few locations. The water comes down from the mountain and is pure as the air, since there are no factories in sight. This is a place where you can ‘wash your eyes’ (cuci mata) as the Indonesians say when they are able to savor the view or watch a female beauty walk by on a terrace.

Kartika,

Entrance and Merapi

Kartika began buying plots of land in Pakem in 2004 until she had accumulated nearly one hectare by 2014. She retained the natural state of the slightly hilly terrain situated on a small brook, and drew up a plan for building and laying out a garden. The residence, amphitheater (pendopo) and gallery all arose in succession, for which she had purchased and brought traditional joglos from the north coast of Java near Kudus region and had relocated there. These houses made of djati and jackfruit (nangka) wood with their practical ventilation techniques are perfectly suited for the tropical climate and ought to be preserved, since they can be considered a part of national heritage.

Like Museum Affandi, Kartika also designed the lush garden.

kartika

Entrance

24 Kartika, for the love of life

Entrance Kartika’s house

Guest house and kitchen

Three ponds were laid out: one with white, one with red lotus blossoms and a third with white orchids. She had (some exotic) trees planted, including several species of frangipani (cambodja), and such fruit trees as passion fruit (marquisa), dragon fruit (naga), bananas, papaya and yellow and green coconut palms, as well as sweet potatoes, and cassava (ketella), and finally various herbs such as curry leaves, lemon grass and galangal roots (laos), even such edible flowers such as rafflesia.

Chickens scratch around the house, cats stray and white doves flutter up and down to the little birdhouse with a pointed roof that was placed on a tall bamboo pole.

Kartika cherishes her little village. It is a paradise on earth, or as she calls it, my love garden.

One son and one daughter have houses along the same road, other children want to come and live there or already live in the vicinity.

Terrace and dining table

26 Kartika, life and work

omahe kartika

← Garden with lotus pond

Pendopo

Interior pendopo

28

Kartika, for the love of life

Entrance Gallery

Interior Gallery: Paintings

Her days at Omahe Kartika follow a fixed routine. She always appears freshly bathed, meticulously made-up, with a flower in her hair and earrings that match one of her many colorful garments, as if she could go straight to a wedding or the opening of an exhibition. She deems it important to take good care of herself and look smart at every moment of the day. After breakfast she slices vegetables for lunch and discusses what the day will bring: which guests are expected, what needs doing in the garden, shopping, building a gazebo, paying out salaries. Kartika is the active head of the family. She both maintains and initiates things.

As the eighty-three year old materfamilias she knows every name and every face and is a constant source of inspiration and the transfer of knowledge to the young people. The Affandi realm currently consists of nine children, twenty-one grandchildren and nineteen great-grandchildren.

Her first daughter Helfi was born in London in 1953, followed by Cilla (1954), Lulu (1956), Bambang (1957), Kiki (1958), Andi (1959), Iin (1960), Mimi (1961) and Didit (1962).

Interior Gallery Sculptures

Photo: Elzbieta Agerbeek

Kartika, for the love of life

‘I am happy here,’ she says. ‘In harmony with my surroundings. Without any feelings of resentment, not even towards both my ex-husbands. I am independent and can spend more time on introspection. Nothing in life is black or white. I realize that it must have been difficult to have had me as a wife and artist. As a mother I always wanted to give everything, although during periods of depression I led a wild life. I am now trying to make up for my mistakes and exert my influence to achieve the maximum amount of good.’ In spite of her busy social life, she paints practically every day, combining that with traveling and charity activities.

In the early 1960s she had already founded a school for handicapped children (Yagasan Dharma Renaring Putra), followed in 1993 by a school for deaf children (Yayasan Karna Manohara), both of which still exist. She gives innumerable workshops for the handicapped both at home and abroad, donating paintings for all kinds of causes, and paints on location, varying from a zoo in Surabaya to raise funds to improve the living conditions of the animals to sessions for the Human Rights Organization in prisons in Pakem and Yogyakarta.

She leads a healthy life and paces herself. The latter is not easy, because she is always full of plans. Too many to mention, but most of which have to do with the completion of Omahe Kartika.

There are plans for a children’s playground, guest houses, her own burial site and a monumental sculpture of her ancestors. And of course she plans to set up a foundation (Yayasan Kartika) and expects her children to further develop her gallery in Pakem, which apart from her works houses a section for women’s art and two pavilions for the art works of Sapto Hudoyo and outsider art.

Kartika has traveled the world which she still continues to do, but always returns to her roots. In Yogkya she is surrounded by family, loves to lead a simple life and forms the joyful focal point for friends and visitors. At Omahe Kartika she truly celebrates sharing life together.

View from the Gallery