Tintin Wulia grew up in a borderland.

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 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

Photo: PRIVATE

Tintin Wulia grew up in Indonesia during Suharto’s brutal military regime.

multimedia approach. Often this entails getting the spectators involved in the work, or by creating experiences with the help of videos, murals, sound or performance. The exploration of topics such as social policy, borders, migration and identity is a common theme in her work. Something she largely believes is based on the experience of growing up under the Suharto regime.

– Growing up as an Indochinese person means belonging to a group that is legally discriminated against. This is probably one of the reasons why my family has always attached great importance to legal documents and other documentation, as they help you prove that you have the right to live in your own country.

Much of this was expressed in the form of the art project Make your own passport, with which she participated at the Science Festival this year. The fact that her homeland is located right in the middle of two continents has also strongly affected her. Indonesia is wedged between Australia to the south-east and Asia to the west. And is surrounded by two of the world's great oceans. – Indonesia is truly a border country in that sense. This also entails a lot of embedded conflict.

Tintin Wulia sees combining artistic practice with research as a way of honing her artistic work. Such as using a clear framework and a schedule. Even as an artist, she engages in theoretical work. – I combine the roles of researcher and artist. The strength of this is that even as an artist, I am really expected to achieve something when the work is linked to research.

That she came to Sweden in 2018 stems from the fact that a friend had found out that the School of Global Studies was looking for a postdoctoral fellow in crafts, design and art, with a focus on migration. – This is you, he said. “Apply!” And I did it without knowing the faculty or ever having set foot in Gothenburg before.

She got the job, which was thus divided between HDK-Valand and the School of Global Studies. Now that she has received SEK 15 million to conduct an interdisciplinary study on how aesthetic objects lead to socio-political change, she sees it as a natural development in her work to explore issues related to migration and geopolitics.

Not least considering that our way of looking at and experiencing different objects can change dramatically depending on the context, according to Tintin Wulia. – You can affect individuals with objects that exist in both political and social institutions. When an object is embedded in a social interaction, there is something that triggers how we experience the object in that particular situation. I want to investigate this through both theory and practice.

That she is the first researcher at the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts to receive research funding from the ERC, one of the largest and most prestigious grants a researcher can receive early in their career, she feels is a tremendous honour, but also a responsibility. A research team will be put together, including research assistants who will work with various organizations in several countries.

She wants to develop the method related to the practical work of handling objects while at the same time introducing theory and a research perspective into the project. – That is the strength of being artistically grounded in your research. You are not only permitted to work in a practical manner. You are expected to do so.

Something very powerful emerged when I started communicating and asking questions about my secrets.

TINTIN WULIA

Hanna Jedvik

Tintin Wulia

Born: In 1972 in Bali, Indonesia. Profession: Artist and researcher at HDK-Valand - Academy of Art and Design. Lives in: Godalming, United Kingdom.

Tintin Wulia's work Nous ne notons pas les fleurs (2010) is based on a filmed experiment. It consists of a world map where flowers, spices and herbs represent different countries. Participants were invited to move around the ingredients according to personal experiences and their travels, which resulted in this work of art.