Report
Makes art of her country's trauma Tintin Wulia grew up in the borderland between two continents, with music as a constant companion. Today, she is an international artist and postdoctoral fellow at HDK-Valand - Academy of Art and Design and has received SEK 15 million in support from the European Research Fund (ERC) for her ne Tintin Wulia is in between places right now, as she puts it. After spending the past few years dividing her life between Brisbane in Australia and an apartment in Linnéstaden, she is now in the process of setting up home in Godalming in the south-east of England. – I will be returning to Gothenburg in June. Then we’ll see what things are like in the autumn and later in the future, says Tintin Wulia from her computer screen at home. Today, the whole world is her workplace. But she was born in 1972 in Bali, Indonesia, where she grew up under Suharto's brutal military regime. A dark period in Indonesia’s history, when hundreds of thousands of political prisoners were imprisoned and murdered. During an initial investigation in 1975, 55,000 people were still imprisoned without trial. One of the people murdered during this period was Tintin's grandfather. – It was a family secret. We never spoke
about it with anyone outside the family. But this was a major political conflict and many people have gone through the same experience as us. As an Indochinese person, I grew up with propaganda that led me to believe that people like us deserved to be murdered. At a time when you risked being exposed and seen as a political opponent if you told the truth, this type of story tends to stay within the family, she explains. Silence became a natural part of both
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private and public life. – If you grow up with a secret that absolutely must not be revealed, there is nothing that makes you pause and question what you have been through. Instead, you get used to never asking questions.
When she eventually realized the extent of the regime's influence on her upbringing, and the terrible effects Suharto's regime had had, she slowly but surely began to delve into her family’s and the country's history. Something that at the age of twenty resulted in her first work of art, where she examined her own and other people's experiences in the country. – Something very powerful emerged when I started communicating and asking questions about my secrets. Initially, she was careful about including Suharto's regime in her art. Only much later, at the age of thirty, five years after the fall of the regime, did she dare
to express herself in a more pronounced way regarding her background and the country's trauma. At the time, she had started a doctoral degree in art at RMIT University in Melbourne, a safe distance from her home country. Prior to that, she had spent several years teaching music, studying to be an architect and experimenting with various types of media, as well as going on tour in Germany with a band, as their video photographer. Music and art have always been a natural part of Tintin Wulia's life.
– I grew up in the music school that my
parents founded. My mother and father met when they were playing in a student orchestra, and my mother's first job was teaching, which she continued to do until she was 78 years old. Dedicating myself to art in some form always felt very natural. For the past 20 years that she has spent in the profession, her art has been characterized by a process-based and
