Jogja Biennale XI – Shadow Lines: Indonesia meets India
Art from India and Indonesia met across the equator in the eleventh edition of the Jogja Biennale, held in Jogjakarta (or Yogyakarta), Indonesia. Fifteen Indian and twenty-five Indonesian artists were invited to contemplate the potent themes of Spirituality, Religiosity and Belief for works which were split across two main venues, Taman Budaya and the National Museum of Yogyakarta.
Located in the centre of Java, Indonesia, Jogja cradles a rich heritage which attests to the ancient trade and cultural ties with India that commenced sometime between the 1st and 7th centuries CE, with a stream of Indian migrants trading textiles and spices. With this trade, spread the influence of the Indian civilization. Many Southeast Asian kingdoms were influenced by Buddhist and Hindu philosophy which blended with the region’s indigenous beliefs, thereby permeating rituals, traditions, language, art and architecture. The Buddhist monument Borobudur, and the Prambanan temples near Jogja quietly evidence centuries-old links with the Indian subcontinent, well before the arrival of Islam, and Javanese folklore and Wayang Kulit puppetry still today narrate the great Indian epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.
Both nations have also struggled through western imperialism and decades of colonial subjugation to eventually establish themselves as independent secular sovereign nations—one with an overwhelmingly Muslim majority and the other, overwhelmingly Hindu. Indeed, due to the nations’ similar and side by side struggle for independence, political ties were forged via an open cross-border dialogue at the Bandung Conference in 18–25 April 1956, at which India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Indonesia’s first President Achmad Sukarno met with leaders of other Asian and African countries from around the equator.
Perhaps in the spirit of such an historical event, with