Coinciding with sit-ins by an anti-government pressure group on the streets outside, the show felt like living proof of the proposition fleshed out in Lenzi’s new book. The “aesthetics of agency” engendered by such works is, she argues, a coded and often covert response to historical contexts and real-world conditions in illiberal locales: a subtle form of empowerment. As a result, the western modes it is tempting to label them with (social sculpture, relational aesthetics, and so on) are a poor fit.
Every so often in its fifty-year history, the Jakarta Biennale has catalyzed a shift (the 1974 Indonesian New Art Movement started as a protest against its conservatism) or sparked a nationwide discourse about the state of Indonesian art (as with the experimental mid-nineties iterations). More recently, changes of format and structure—the cancellation of the 2000 edition due to insufficient funds, the 2009 “internationalization,” the establishment of the Jakarta Biennale Foundation in 2014, the “pandemic edition”—have reflected developments in the way that contemporary art is made and understood.
Criticism dramatizes these intergenerational tensions. Younger writers dismiss the work of older artists as no longer fitting to a changed world; older writers dismiss new movements as shallow in their thinking or derivative in their strategies. These frictions between different generations—like those between different cultures—generate the heat and light that animate the history of art. So it has always been, so it always will be.
This survey of Nástio Mosquito’s work from the early 2000s to the present begins, before it begins, before it begins. This cascade of overtures starts in the entrance hall of M HKA, which doubles as a reading room. In front of one of the bookshelves, a small cubicle monitor sits on a plinth: it shows Mosquito delivering a speech in the Senaat, one of the two chambers of the Federal Parliament of Belgium.
In summer 2024, at the invitation of a literary residency in Gdańsk, Libkind made a flag from her belongings and rags, which she had previously covered in fat and black soil, and wrote on it “One hundred years” (a traditional wish for a long life). This flag looks like it was pulled from the grave—it reeks of death. But residents of occupied cities buried Ukrainian flags in the same way in 2022, just as Crimean Tatars, later deported from their native peninsula, used to bury their own documents and artifacts.
The punning title “Fan Fiction” could refer to the fictional narratives we construct in order to cope with our daily lives or the way we mimic others in order to survive. Remove from the show its theory-laden and overdetermining press release, and it boils down to a simple idea: the human need for control. Erlanger suggests that this desire to exert perfect control over our environments is a fantasy, revealed as absurd when we attempt to put it into practice.
