![Citra Sasmita, Timur Merah Project: The Embrace of My Motherland, 2019, acrylic on Kamasan canvas with turmeric and spices, 90 × 400 cm. Courtesy Biennale Jogja XV, Yogyakarta]](https://artlogic-res.cloudinary.com/w_800,h_800,c_limit,f_auto,fl_lossy,q_auto/ws-artlogicwebsite0486/usr/images/press/main_image/items/79/79cc2f98afac48b399608e5375cf792b/citra-sasmita-timur-merah-project_-the-embrace-of-my-motherland-2019-1.jpeg)
Do we live in the same playground? is an acid-laced provocation. It stings of the resentment accumulated through years of systematic marginalisation. Indeed, focusing on Indonesia in particular and Southeast Asia more generally, its curators – Akiq AW, Arham Rahman and Penwadee Nophaket Manont – use this rhetorical question to foreground the underprivileged and the forgotten through the work of 52 artists from the region. But unlike other exhibitions that address Southeast Asia as a spatial periphery of an international artworld, this one posits that ‘Southeast Asia’ as a geopolitical construct creates, in and of itself, other peripheries that require attention. In this context, ‘the periphery’ is not a place as much as it is the communities that live within the category of ‘Southeast Asia’ but don’t benefit from that construction, while still suffering from the histories of neoliberalism out of which Southeast Asia, as a regional trade zone and geographic entity, was created. Do we live in the same playground? is neither your typical international nor regional biennale.
Yet, it is a biennale in all the ways that make biennales important discursive spaces and curatorial platforms. Presented across three main locations including Taman Budaya and Jogja National Museum, the exhibition privileges artworks that highlight lesser-known subjectivities as well as practices that are informed by long-term engagements with communities and lived experiences from the region. Bali-born Citra Sasmita’s Timur Merah Project: The Embrace of My Motherland (2019), for example, is an installation comprising suspended spice bags, text written in turmeric on the floor and scrolls that recall Kamasan paintings – a waning tradition of Balinese painting that illustrates canonical Javanese narratives such as the stories of Panji Malat, or the Indian epics of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. Citra herself learned the form through meeting Mangku Murray, a Kamasan painter in Bali. Her installation reimagines the kakawin (a formal Javanese court literature fusing Hindu mythology and accounts of contemporary court life), originally written by male authors and articulating patriarchal rule, by shifting the attention to women as active protagonists in these stories.
