Alÿs built his project around the Strait of Gibraltar, which is one of the most visible hinges between the Global North and Global South. In ongoing, so-called “postcolonial” forms of resource extraction, multinational corporations and debt service payments, alongside internal state corruption and dysfunction, funnel wealth out of African countries, thereby helping to propel the tide pushing workers and families toward Europe and the United States.
Like many recent exhibitions of a similar size, “Mil Graus” presents a mix of recurring themes that can feel unmanageable. It’s as if the inclusion of concepts ranging from ecology and the post-Anthropocene world to colonization, queerness, identity, ritualism, or the sometimes-disconcerting mix of the esoteric and the political, all melted into the same pot, were a mandatory bureaucratic requirement.
Jalal critiques the ways in which perceptions of value are propagated through print and visual culture. Here, the artist positions the fleeting acquisition of social status as a Pyrrhic victory whose cost is violence and destruction. In a small untitled collage made on a Cadillac owner’s manual, we see sheets of silver leaf pressed around the embossed logo of the luxury vehicle, a signifier of upward mobility, particularly in Black communities (Cadillac was among the first car companies to sell to African Americans in the 1930s).
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.
