Jakarta Biennale XIII 2009
I had been warned that Jakarta’s taxi drivers might not know where the National Museum was, but did not believe it. But I had underestimated how low the profile of public cultural institutions is in a country in which so much of the artistic activity and heritage is privately controlled. Hence, almost an hour past the scheduled official opening time I was still stuck in a cab crawling through a terminally congested central Jakarta, hopelessly peering through a thick wall of tropical rain in the hope of making out the white-framed architectural contours of the Museum.
In the end we were saved by Agustina, one the fantastically helpful Biennale support staff, who, when I finally managed to get a working cell phone line to her, was able to guide us to our destination (where I discovered that I had only missed out on a bit of hanging around and chit-chat as the inauguration was running even more behind schedule than I was). Once I finally started to visit the show I discovered there was close link between the feeling of existential stuckness one experiences while mired in Jakarta’s overburdened systems of communication and transportation, and the core of the 13th Jakarta Biennale. The experience, both individual and collective, of the city’s complex web of multiple, and often conflicting, systems of social, political and symbolic interaction, was very much the dominant theme of this event.
Under the collective title of ARENA the Jakarta Biennale comprised three main sections: ‘Battle Zone’, featuring interventions in public spaces, ‘Fluid Zone’ that was the core group show and ‘Zones of Understanding’ that showcased collateral multi-arts events. It was an ambitious undertaking for an event with... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline