Dear Curator Curate Me - Yogyakarta - 2014

Yogyakarta, March/April 2014 Dear Curator Curate Me (http://www.dearcuratorcurateme.info/) is a traveling project by the nomadic visual artist Kristoffer Arde単a. Dear Curator Curate Me consists of 15 videos from different makers and each time this project is organized different curators are invited to write a curatorial essay on the same set of videos. This time around, the following curators were invited: Mira Asriningtyas, Pitra Hutomo and Grace Samboh. Dear Curator Curate Me in Yogyakarta is organized in collaboration with Ruang MES56 (http://mes56.com/) and Cemeti Art House (http://www.cemetiarthouse.com). Roma Arts coordinates Dear Curator Curate Me in Indonesia (http://romaarts.org/).

// Fill the Space // Mira Asriningtyas

“Let us study things that are no more. It is necessary to understand them if not only to avoid them.”

(Victor Hugo) ***** 1/ Introduction: Pain that Shouts C.S.Lewis once said that pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world. Watching half of the videos in this series, I find it true. Some of the videos left bitterness that bites and hurts. The pain lingers and I wanted to understand more; trying to make sense of it all. The first video, Still Hear the Wound, shows paintings by Iri and Toshi Maruiki about the mass suicide during the battle of Okinawa in 1945. The haunting images are completed with a music composition by Yuji Takayashi and a poem by Koukichi Nakaya, an Okinawan poet who committed suicide himself.

During the Second World War, more than a quarter of Okinawa's civilian population died. Not only was it caused by the war but also by the military coercion of compulsory mass suicide (shudan jiketsu) among civilians. There are several reasons behind this act: 1. An emphasis on a sense of solidarity about death was cultivated. 2.

Fear of seeing loved ones being killed cruelly by the enemy. 3. Education to make everyone an imperial subject, which makes dying for the emperor the supreme national morality.1 It was an act of love by close relatives to kill one another with their own hands.

Driven by all those reasons; civilians started throwing themselves and the family off the cliff, using hand grenades to blow themselves up, and committing mutual suicide.

Fathers killed their sons; sons killed their own mothers and sisters. Survivors are haunted by the sense of guilt for murdering the loved ones for the rest of their life.

1

“Compulsory Mass Suicide, the Battle of Okinawa, and Japan's Textbook Controversy” by Aniya Masaaki for The Okinawa Times and Asahi Shinbun, 2007.

Less than two months after the end of the bloody battle of Okinawa, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused Japan to surrender. This was once again captured in the silent journey to Hiroshima from 1914 to 2006 illustrated by 600 photographs of the Genbaku Dome in a video titled 200,000 Phantoms by JeanGabriel Périot. These photographs are the witness of a city that was destroyed but eventually survived, transformed, and became a silent symbol of the savagery of war almost a century later.

Those two videos showing the dismay of the Second World War are followed by more recent images of chaos and sociopolitical propaganda of Spain’s economic turndown in 2011. The conditions are portrayed in two videos: first by Javier Cruz who performs an act of saving six euros by eating the money and blocks the anal passage by inserting a one-euro coin; and second, by Eduardo Fernandez who uses a small digital camera to record the protest on the 15th of May in Plaza del Sol Madrid known as the 15-M Movement that became the initial call to other cities demanding radical political and economic changes.

Having watched the previous videos portraying tense images of chaos and war, Michelle Dizon’s video titled Empire (ABS – CBN) suddenly felt menacing. The sound of fireworks behind the TV station’s tower suddenly sounds like explosions and tragedy while it actually was taken during a New Year’s Eve celebration. Yet again, aside from being an appropriation of Warhol-Mekas work in 1964; it also tells an ironic story of a 15-minutes fame reality show that lead to an incident that killed 76 people in 2006. This is not a fair comparison to the other videos rich with history, political issues, and huge statistics of casualties. But then again, history is not about dates and places and wars (or in this case: numbers). It is more about people who fill the space between them.2 2/ Aftermath: The Other Side of the Coin Just when the bombarding images of war and chaos are done, a slideshow starts showing Kathy Cousley’s life. Suddenly, what seems to be a very normal and happy life of a woman feels out of place. What happened on the other side of the world

2

Quoted from Jodi Picoult, “History isn't about dates and places and wars. It’s about the people who fill the space between them.”

when Kathy was born, went to high school, met her soul mate, attending graduations and weddings of her two daughters, and holds her grandkids? This portrait of a ‘normal life’ is followed by a vernacular vacation video of Robbins and Meg’s Spectacular Sweden and Norway Adventure raising a question of how could the lives of people who fill the space between history remain so detached to one another? In such case, do personal issues that start out as simple as loneliness and generation gap portrayed by Singaporean artist Jow Zhi Wei in Outing even matter? Is it really that simple?

Of course, there are other videos presented that become a bridge between life after war and life during wartime. A Place to Live was a post-war public service announcement that talks about senior citizens and how they can spend the rest of their lives with quality. There is also a heartwarming video about Manola, an 87 year-old lady who survived all the post-war drama in Manola Takes the Bus. Questions then once again rise about changes, home, human mobility, migration, and colonialism as appear in the videos of Tracing Trades, How to Pick Berries, A Fossilized Moment of Doubt, and Sunday (E )scapes.

3/ Montage: Seeing the Whole Picture Watching the 15 videos one by one, I was perplexed. These videos have a very thin line that connects the dots; either by time period, subject, and location. There are videos that talk about war, followed by videos that are deeply personal and vernacular, and those that are in between and talk more about home, migration, and current social conditions on different sides of the world. But when the whole 15 videos are seen as a big picture, the image and feeling are similar to that of Martha Rosler’s work Bringing the War Home. How pandemonium might actually be happening right now on the other side of the world, yet it feels distanced and very far away.

In Bringing the War Home (1967-1972), Martha Rosler created a series of photomontages combining distressing image of Vietnam War from Life magazine with peaceful all-American domestic interior images from House Beautiful magazine.

These montages create a juxtaposition between the comfort and prosperity of post-war America in contrast with the dread that is happening in the country in conflict.

Rosler’s montages were originally circulated as anti-war propaganda during the height of the war and only two decades later considered as an artwork.

Photomontage, with its roots in German Dada produced in the wake of the First World War, has a history of being an effective aestheticpolitical technique. It uses the cut-and-paste process to create scenes that read as coherent authentic spaces.3 The same technique is used in this screening of 15 videos, shown in a particular lineup that creates a big ‘montage’ of videos. These montages might not give an answer to make sense of it all but it raises questions about the two sides of life that might actually be connected but falsely separated. There is a sense of separation between the ‘here’ and ‘there’ where people from more peaceful places simply could not imagine what is happening in a country in conflict.

Kathy’s life will remain undisturbed by the invasion to Iraq, for example. The migrant workers have their own issues that need their attention more than those that are happening far beyond their concern. For both Rosler’s work and these 15 seemingly random videos, there is an interconnectedness of domesticity and war, personal history and the history of the world, and the people who fill the space in between. In the societies where ignorance is considered a bliss there is a need to give a little pinch in people’s heart with a bit of pain to remind them that some histories should not repeat themselves.

The last video shown,4 The End by Agnieszka Pokrywka, wraps things up in a more poetic way. This video was inspired by Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five, whose main character Billy Pilgrim has the ability to ‘time-travel’. In this video, the propaganda films of the 40s are reversed backwards, creating almost magical fictions where the war can be undone, the dead can be awakened, the bombing machine can take back the agony it caused and humans become two perfect people that were meant

3

“Martha Rosler: Bringing the War Home” by Allison Berkeley, The Worcester Art Museum, (WORCESTER, Mass., August 2, 2007).

4 In this ‘video screening’, the videos shown had a particular lineup to make sense of it all. It started with Still Hear the Wound, 200,000 Phantoms, To Save 6 Euros, 15-M, Empire (ABS – CBN), followed with the peaceful life of Kathy, Robbins and Meg’s Spectacular Sweden and Norway Adventure, Outing, compared with the post-war life in A Place to Live and Manola Takes the Bus, and followed by stories of migration in Tracing Trades, How to Pick Berries, A Fossilized Moment of Doubt, and Sunday (E)scapes. The whole series is wrapped up with The End.

for one another. What was once documentary footage is turned into a fictional work with a surreal sense of time and space. The reversed historical fact is so full of wonder. But then again, it is such a utopic thought to try to undo the past. Life that is lost will stay lost, pain cannot be undone, and history should not repeat itself.

How Can We Take High School History Teachers to Watch Video Art? Pitra Hutomo The ZanshŌ no Oto5 video begins with three paragraphs on Okinawa’s locations and the deaths of a quarter of its population in 1945. The death rate was even worse after a morbid marching order was issued by the Japanese high officials to the local people: commit suicide. The sons were killed by their fathers, after they killed their mothers and sisters. The surviving ones were haunted for life by guilt for taking the lives of their loved ones.

For less than 21 minutes, the video shows painting fragments by Iri and Toshi Maruki accompanied by a Yuji Takahashi’s composition performed by Suigyu Gakudan music group. A song from Koukichi Nakaya’s prose enriches the last five minutes, that the piece is a statement of his anxiety when watching a film starred by Akira Kobayashi.

From the English subtitle in the video (00:21:23 - 00:21:49): when people are being killed and dying in film everyone looks like dying with pleasure and happiness I could not find a comprehensive reference on Koukichi Nakaya, but some published essays on the Battle of Okinawa cited his text entitled Namae yo Tatte Aruke (My name, stand and walk!). This video by Soni Kum was released along with a book consisting 12 essays and interview videos for a project with the same title in 2009.

The release of the texts and videos was part of the Asia, Politics and Art project (2006 to 2008), which goal was to heal lingering wounds6 from tragedies throughout history: World War II in East Asia, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

5

Dear Curator, Curate Me uses the title of the video as Soni Kum has it in English, that is, "Still Hear The Wound". However, because other references use various ways of translation such as "Sounds of Lingering Wounds,” I decided to use the original title in Japanese.

6 This project is highlighted by Rebecca Jennison and Laura Hein in "Against Forgetting: Three Generations of Artists in Japan in Dialogue about the Legacies of World War II," The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol.9, Issue 30 No.1, July 25, 2011.

Rebecca Jennison and Laura Hein put Asia, Politics and Art in the spotlight as a very actual effort – even when this project involved various artists from various ages – to demonstrate how wars are perceived and remembered by the third generation after World War II in Japan and Korea. Soni Kum and his contemporaries spent their student years with history textbooks rewritten by the Japanese Government.7 Some of the artists involved in the project are notably Okinawans, and also ‘Resident Koreans’.

Having been born and raised in Indonesia, it is actually a bit difficult for me to imagine how World War II affects the Japanese traumatically for three generations.

The history textbooks in my formal education years in the 1990s never explicitly informed readers on this post-war trauma in countries occupied by Japan, especially on how the Japanese people survived the global political crisis at that time.8 In my memory, what I can have at best is only how I and my peers were supposed to be grateful for our nice and easy life, in contrast with the 350 or 3.5 years of colonization hardships, and how we were able to live the meaning of our independence. Whatever that may be....

The absence of war victims taken as a mere collateral damage in history lessons is nothing new in many parts of the world, not only in Indonesia or Japan. The

7

The Japan Policy Research Institute paperwork Num. 48: July 1998 entitled “The Battle of Okinawa in Japanese History Books” written by Koji Taira stated that there was an omission of the sentence “About 800 civilians of Okinawa prefecture were murdered by the Japanese troops on grounds that they hindered the fighting." By the ministry of education/Monbusho during 1981-82 from high school history textbooks. This incident happened again in 1983 to a history book written by Saburo Ienaga, so that Ienaga sued Monbusho until the Supreme Court. After he sued for the third time, the Supreme Court granted Ienaga’s demand on four points, but it did not grant his demand concerning the writing of the Battle of Okinawa Monbusho’s version. Source: http://www.jpri.org/publications/workingpapers/wp48.html accessed 11 February 2014.

8 It seems that there are no significant changes in the history books used by high school students in the 2000s. I can say this after I carefully read two books published by the Ministry of National Education of Indonesia, from the Electronic School Book program, Memahami Sejarah (Understanding History) that is written by Tarunasena M. for high school and MA –madrassa alawiyah (an islamic version of high school) for the first and second semester of the XI grade of the social sciences major, and another is Sejarah (History) that is written by Dwi Ari Listiyani for the same grade of the language major. The two books, both published in 2009, mention about the arrival of the colonialists chronologically after introducing the Hindu-Buddha-Islam kingdoms as the time of the beginning of foreign influence including western influence, the time of military occupation, and the time of the rise of national movements. In spite of opting for an education pattern designed by the colonial authority and analyzing how the system was applied, the book Memahami Sejarah prescripted the characteristics of colonial education as dualistic, gradualist, concordant, and strictly supervised. Can you imagine what kind of discussion will be in the classroom?

recurrence of neo-colonialism re-spawned in various forms and shapes is just to worsen the same old basic instinct of a certain group’s own and vested interests under the disguise of nationalism. Therefore, it is not unusual if Indonesians, both young and old, are quite busy with finding a strong figure that can represent the nation’s aspiration and then focus their energy to adamantly support the heroic figures in defining the nationhood.

This tendency is nowhere to be found in the video by Soni Kum. By synergizing pictures, music and texts, ZanshŌ no Oto re-enacts the depth of sensational experience that cannot be possibly grasped if only screened once or twice. Each element strongly opposes the Battle of Okinawa, so when the synergy reaches full circle, I was almost lost in unquenched emotions. No historical figures that are specifically defended or blamed, because the Maruki couple as told by Toshi once said: “We do paint dark, cruel, painful scenes. But the question is, how should we portray people who face such realities? We want to paint them beautifully.”9 The Maruki couple, who were categorized as artists living the war10 by Jennison and Hein, faces the idea brainstorming transition of Japan as the victim; they became the exposed figures (and probably the searched figures) of who the real victims of military aggressions around the world might be.

The artistic framing by Soni Kum potentially distorts the wholeness of the pictures by the Maruki couple because their painting consisting of panels covering an area of 1.8x7.2 meters is presenting not only one or two figures gloomily bathed in blood, but also an aura of empty and desolated landscapes. Nevertheless, ZanshŌ no Oto is brilliantly executed because after conducting a thorough study on Kum’s artistic

9

http://imaginationwithoutborders.northwestern.edu/maruki-toshi-and-iri.html accessed February 11, 2014.

10 Jennison and Hein started from a theory by Marianne Hirsch on the distinction of memorizing behavior between generations. The first generation is the one that experienced the war like the Maruki couple, the second generation is their children like Art Spiegelman – the author of Maus: A Survivor’s Tale – or Yoshiko Shimada with her works on the role of Japanese women in making the war successful (White Aprons, 1992), and the third generation is Soni Kum and his contemporaries who thought that it was important to assemble the voice of the Okinawan people. In an interview, one of the Asia, Politics and Art project participants, Yamashiro Chikako, who also made a video entitled Sinking Voices, Red Breath (2010), Revealed the reason why her sources tried to tell what they can remember even though it is so bitter and painful: “Because we can survive, you can be born in this world. Now, 65 years after the war was over, we have to tell you what really happened.”

activities, it is implied that he believes in universal humanitarian values, and at the same time it is still likely to doubt the beliefs that he is weaving into an artwork.

In my opinion this is the point that incites anxiety or a pinch of boredom, when viewers view the video without trying to know better how the Battle of Okinawa is told in news and stories. Luckily Kum provides enough space for his spectators to become anxious after being exposed with bloody pictures and tearing music background, without posing cumbersome numbers or stereotypical idioms on humanity. The only thing that still stands in between us – even after an extensive scrutiny on the Battle of Okinawa – is the text used by Kum for the opening part of the video. That simple yet obnoxious part is able to distract the spectators by having statements like, “Gosh, this is absolutely emotionally exhausting” or “What’s the difference between this and the usual programs on History Channel or National Geographic?” in their mind.

Again, nevertheless, by synergizing the elements from other works that are strong enough to stand on their own, Soni Kum (probably) also wants to say that an audiovisual work does not have to be made of new recording or found footage; if the visual archives are handsomely available, the maker can re-mix many pieces that represent her or his ideas.

I hope that by watching this video we can be sparred from the confusion of an Arundhati Roy who was facing people whose concerns on the horror of war, whose concerns on the horror of war are only perceivable when perceiving ‘real war’ news – like a nuclear attack – without realizing that in our daily lives we live our life pointing our guns to each other with our shaking finger uneasily rests on its ferocious trigger.11

11

Inspired from the introduction of "The Cost of Living" (2007). The original sentence is “Have we raised the threshold of horror so high that nothing short of a nuclear strike qualifies as a 'real' war? Are we to spend the rest of our lives in this state of high alert with guns pointed at each other's heads and fingers trembling on the trigger?”

A letter of withdrawal Grace Samboh I am a rather suspicious person and I am a bit cynical to the structure of Dear Curator Curate Me project just by its title. I haven’t tried to Google anything about this project and I haven’t discussed anything about this project with the other curators involved in the Yogyakarta edition of this project. I did know that one a friend of mine was part of the Bandung edition of this project at Selasar Sunaryo Art Space in 2013. I read the catalog, but somehow I didn’t manage to remember any part of it but the fact remains that they managed to make an invisible exhibition out of these videos about to write. That’s as much as I know. I started writing this essay before I started watching any of the videos included in this project. My guidelines are: I would only watch all the videos once—or at least try to watch them only ones—and I will not change this very first paragraph afterwards, no matter what. So, here we go.

I started with a genuinely sensible video about the anxiety of being old, both for the person growing old and also for the young in dealing with the old, A Place to Live (1948). I wonder if having to write my impressions about all the videos I will be seeing is what is expected from inviting me to be part of the project. Writing impressions, readings of works, theorizing and discourse-generating are not the kind of things I would expect from a curatorial note nor the kind that I would write. I forbid myself from thinking too much, then, I obediently continue watching the rest of the videos and make my notes during and after watching each of the videos as if I certainly have to do something with these videos afterwards. What is it that I am expected to do?

The title of the project already suggested which part of me, or in what role and capacity. I am expected to write on these videos; as a curator. Several fundamental questions can be raised from that standpoint. What does a curator do? What is curating? Who needs a curator? How does a curator work? These are big questions that have been written in many ways, criticized from many perspectives, changed to many forms, etc. Let’s be more specific by narrowing down the previous questions to the context of this project. What is expected within the given guidelines (to write a

curatorial essay about all these videos and not to mention the selector of the videos)?

Since some of the people invited to the Yogyakarta-side of the project are not curators, which role of a curator is the project looking for? How does this project define a curatorial practice? What kind of curatorial work is this project looking for? I am left with guessing or assuming and I am not fond of both.

I myself have never worked as a curator in a condition where a set of works is already chosen and all of them have to included in an curatorial essay (as if they are to be included in one exhibition). I am someone who thinks that a curator is someone who does not exist without any kind of show, exhibition, publication, dissemination of a certain idea in a certain form in a certain space. This role is therefore similar to being ‘a bridge’ that connects the idea, the form, the space and a designated audience. In that sense, what is to bridge here within this project? The initiating artist wishes to not be mentioned at all. The selected videos are not all consciously made as art. Yes, you can say that, “Art is whatever we put in an art gallery,” or, “Art is whatever a curator say it is art,” but I disagree to that. Not just me, but the situation that I am living in now does not allow that. A curator does not have that power. One can make bad or ugly artwork(s) and a curator can praise it like hell, but it will never make that ugly thing become good, not even have a better reputation.

As for these 15 videos, I wouldn’t dare to just write down my impressions of them as I think everyone in the whole wide world who is given access to see all these 15 videos in a set have the right to do so too. So why are my impressions (and some others that are known as curators) that are written down and published by the selectors? What makes curators’ impression more important than those of others that it needs to be written down, documented and discussed? The same goes to analysis and interpretations. Decades ago, Roland Barthes’ death of the author have freed the rights of means-reproduction, means-generating from the exclusivity of certain elites.

It kills me everytime I think that parts of my essay still have to come back to saying something about the 15 videos. I cannot seem to for myself to create a discourse for them, even only a fictional one. I tried sketching three structures of essay for this project; one that pretends that I am an archivist of a new online database of moving images (so all kinds of moving images are accepted), so what I did was categorizing

the videos based on the making/editing/presentation technicalities therefore genres; another one that stitch all the videos together as if there is one narrative, and, sure, that can work, but I am not happy with it; and the last one was commentaries. It all did not work out for me because those are not the kind of curatorial notes (one of the outputs of a curatorial work) that I have in mind.

Therefore, I am sending you this note as a withdrawal from the Dear Curator Curate Me project. I am aware that because I have agreed upon joining the project that even this withdrawal letter can be acted upon as an essay. I leave the decision to the initiator and organizers of the project. I am open to further discussing on the curators’ role from my point of view, but not about these 15 videos.

Biography Mira Asriningtyas (b.1986) is the founder of Lir~ an alternative art space, reading room, and a story-book based restaurant in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. After graduating from the International Business and Management Program, Atmajaya Yogyakarta University in 2008, she is actively engaged with the busy art scene of Yogyakarta while continuously making art projects at Lir with other organizations or independently. In 2011, she received Magang Nusantara to Selasar Sunaryo Art Space where she became curator assistant. In 2012, she was selected as one of the young curators in Young Curator Forum at Cemeti Art House. In 2013, she went for a residency and research program at 98B COLLABoration, Manila, the Philippines. She started curating exhibitions and art projects in 2011. Three of her latest curated exhibitions include The Memories of Unidentified Experience by Dito Yuwono at KKF (2014), Lunang by Iwan Effendi at Lir Space (2013), and Gendis by Lala Bohang at Lir Space (2013). She is now opening a residency program, an "Exhibition Lab.", and working as the in-house curator for Lir Space. She also works as a regular contributor to Home/Creative Space articles in Elle DÊcor Indonesia and Dewi Magazine while writing online about art. www.miraasriningtyas.com Pitra Hutomo (b.1984) currently works as archive and data base development staff at Indonesian Visual Art Archive (IVAA) since 2008. From 2004 to 2005, Pitra sometimes helped an organization formerly called Yayasan Seni Cemeti (YSC; Cemeti Art Foundation), as a reporter and a freelance writer. She then became a documentary staff member in 2006, and she was also involved in designing the online archive concept after YSC became IVAA in 2007. Her other activities include joining artist collaborations, such as working with Maryanto and Grace Samboh, or with several Jogja Greenmapper activists for Video Report. And with Grace Samboh, she is a member of Hyphen http://hyphen.web.id Grace Samboh (b.1984) veered away from her undergraduate degree in advertising and graduated her master from the Visual Art Studies program at Gadjah Mada University’s Graduate School (2009). She started her interest in the arts at ruangrupa, an artist-collective

based in Jakarta. In 2009, Indonesian Visual Art Archive (IVAA) commissioned her to curate the 21 Years Retrospective of Jogja Biennale as one of the archive-based shows at the Jogja Biennale IX – Jogja Jamming (2009). She participated in the making of Langgeng Art Foundation (2010-2011) as the executive director/curator. With her colleagues, she started a closed-door discussion group called Hyphen in 2011. Hyphen seeks to sew bits by bits of the fragmented Indonesian art history. Hyphen is now an office that does arts and cultural research and curatorial acts. She is now curating autonomously and tied to Hyphen for arts’ research, publishing and organizational works. http://sambohgrace.wordpress.com/

Dear Curator Curate Me (http://www.dearcuratorcurateme.info/) is the brainchild of Kristoffer Ardeña. He (1976) is a visual artist and curator who was born and raised in Dumaguete, Philippines, but has lived, since 18 years old, between the USA and Europe. He has curated projects at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo del UNAM in Mexico City and at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila in the Philippines. He just created the curatorial platform MILF (Moving Image Lab Filipinas). It experiments with video as an exhibition platform and aims to foster exchange between the Philippines, Southeast Asia and Latin America-Spain. He has created individual projects in Museo Carrillo Gil, in Mexico, Selesar Sunaryo Art Space, Bandung (Indonesia), Vargas Museum and the Cultural Center of the Philippines in Manila (Philippines), Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo Museum (Madrid), La Conservera Centro de Arte Contemporáneo in Murcia), Spain. He is currently preparing a series of traveling solo exhibitions. He has also participated in various collective projects, among them the 3rd Bucharest Biennale (Romania), 3rd Guangzhou Triennale (China), Konstholl C in Stockholm (Sweden), Caixa Forum in Barcelona and La Casa Encendida in Madrid (Spain), Casino Forum d’Art Contemporain (Luxembourg), Apexart in New York (USA), Museo Ex Teresa Arte Actual (Mexico) and the Museo de Arte Moderno in Medellin (Colombia). He is going to take part in two group shows at MUSAC and La Conservera, both in Spain.

Dear Curator Curate Me in Yogyakarta is organized by Ruang MES56 (public screening, 28 March 2014) and Cemeti Art House (roundtable discussion, 5 April 2014).

Ruang MES56 Jalan Minggiran 61A Yogyakarta Email: ourmes56@yahoo.com http://mes56.com/

Cemeti Art House Jalan D.I. Panjaitan 41 Yogyakarta Email: cemetiah@indosat.net.id http://www.cemetiarthouse.com

Mardohar B.B. Simanjuntak translated Pitra Hutomo’s essay and biography from Indonesian to English.

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Dear Curator Curate Me in Indonesia is coordinated by Roma Arts (http://romaarts.org/). Roma Arts, founded in 2011, is a collaborative & nomadic initiative which promotes passionate, ambitious and focused ways of producing, presenting, experiencing, and writing about the diverse forms of arts. Roma Arts gives keen attention to art practices, forms of presentation, experiencing the arts, and discourses on art. In 2013, Roma Arts started the website Contemporary Arts Bandung (http://www.contemporaryartsbandung.com) to promote contemporary art and culture in Bandung.