ruangrupa & Documenta15

ruangrupa (which loosely translates as ‘a space for art’) is an artist’s initiative and collective which started in Jakarta, Indonesia in 2000. As a contemporary art ecosystem, it seeks to analyse and mediate ideas of visual art, public art, performance art and video art, to allow visual art to possess a critical sensibility.

While ruangrupa consists of ten core members, its number of members is not fixed. It is also an interdisciplinary team, composed of architects and social scientists among others. As a contemporary art ecosystem, ruangrupa practices lumbung (meaning rice barn in Indonesian), where a common pool system is created and all resources—tangible and intangible—are collected and divided proportionally according to needs. This practice comes from their lifestyle orienting around the rice barn—a place that stores communally-produced rice as a common resource for future use. It also reflects lumbung’s openness, flexibility and responsiveness to surroundings, pointing to how they imagine their world to be. It is this do-it-yourself ethos and a lack of hierarchy that have shaped and sustained what ruangrupa is today.

ruangrupa’s artistic practices culminate in forms of art events and workshops, exhibitions, art writing and criticism workshops, festivals and even parties and karaokes. It functions as a contemporary hub and non-profit organisation, running a research archive, an art lab, radio station, a journal titled Karbon and a publishing arm. Some of their artistic practices and engagements include OK Video (2003-ongoing), a video art festival in collaboration with the Indonesian National Gallery to create an experimental platform for artists working with non-narrative video works and audio-visual language, and Decompression #10, an exhibition celebrating the collective’s 10th anniversary.

Curator David Teh described in Afterall journal in 2012 how ruangrupa’s ‘unruly aesthetic’ ranges from punk to street cultures, documentary, ethnographic research, as well as conceptual and process-oriented experiments. In addition to all these, ruangrupa also has networks of affiliations and collaborations across Indonesia and within Southeast Asia. One such collaboration is with two other art collectives based in Jakarta, namely Grafis Huru Hara, and Serrum, to establish GUDSKUL (pronounced ‘good school’), a public learning space established to practice collective values such as sharing, equality, solidarity and togetherness, which started in 2018.

In 2021, ruangrupa was appointed as curator by documenta 15’s Finding Committee consisting of renowned art experts, which was to take place from June to September 2022. This was seen as an important milestone, since no Asian curator had ever been appointed for documenta, a major contemporary art mega-exhibition held every five years in Kassel, Germany.

One of the reasons for ruangrupa’s selection was that documenta 15 was consciously seeking to give room to non-European views of artists and their practices. To the committee then, ruangrupa’s selection was appropriate, given how ruangrupa’s artistic practices and works showcased its home country, Indonesia, as well as its public sociopolitical problems. For ruangrupa, lumbung for document 15 also expanded alongside documenta’s motive of wanting to heal European war wounds, including those of today’s injuries rooted in colonialism, capitalism and patriarchal structures.

Unfortunately in the course of documenta 15, one of the artworks by an artist collective, Taring Padi, who collaborated with ruangrupa, was accused of containing offensive racial stereotypes. The artwork, People’s Justice, was subsequently dismantled as advised by documenta’s Supervisory Board, and accompanied with an apology by ruangrupa. At the same time, ruangrupa also sought to clarify that People’s Justice was an artwork collectively made in reference to Indonesia’s dark and unresolved political history. They also took the opportunity to mention how some of these accusations seemed to have been made in bad faith, without seeking to mutually engage and learn. However, problematic accusations continued to be levelled against ruangrupa, as they continued to face hostilities and threats, vandalism in some of documenta’s art spaces and a lack of support from documenta.

Much has already been discussed and written in relation to this controversy. However, another lamentable and unfortunate outcome was how this controversy ironically disrupted and short-circuited documenta’s hope of ‘decolonisation’—the giving of exposure to non-European views of artists and their practices, as well as dealing with issues rooted in colonialism, racial hierarchies, capitalism and extractive structures. It also meant a lost opportunity to delve deeper and learn more about ruangrupa’s curatorial practice and ethos of lumbung,  as well as from marginalised non-western artist collectives and their different art practices now gathered in one place over a period of time.

Along this vein with a focus on the arts ecosystem, this controversy more importantly also surfaced and highlighted tensions and differences between ruangrupa’s collaborative and open-ended artistic practices and documenta’s institutional, formal, bureaucratic and managerial approach, accompanied by typical expectations from the arts world on documenta’s mega-arts exhibition platform.

This is best summed up in ruangrupa member, farid rakun’s description of how documenta and ruangrupa ran on two different operating systems. While documenta’s art practices consisted of exhibition-making around object-based art, individual genius solo artists, or one curatorial voice from an individual artistic director, ruangrupa’s mindset was more long-term, and revolved around not merely exhibitions or what to make and show, but who they would have liked to work with, and practiced collaborations with artist collectives, working towards network structures with minimal hierarchies and open-ended learning experiences.

This is not to say that ruangrupa is against art objects, nor denying their own western art education which has also colonised their minds. Rather, against the context of documenta’s style as a mega-exhibition structure, ruangrupa wanted to ask if exhibition-thinking could go beyond itself, by bringing in different contexts, and thinking about art ecosystem’s movements alongside the logic of resources in art practices beyond documenta.

At the same time, the meeting of two different operating systems of ruangrupa and documenta also beg the important question—to what kind of public/s and visitors did they envision to reach out to? While documenta typically reached out to an ‘enlightened’ and often elite crowd that was familiar, if not well-versed in (western) contemporary arts and visual culture, many works in documenta 15 were not so much  the ‘usual’ art objects. Rather, they were many things at once—a sharing of artistic practices and showcase of collaborations, and in a way resisting expectations for a ‘usual’ documenta, now inhabited by non-western artists.

This controversy also brings us to think about art institutions such as documenta’s efforts at ‘decolonising’ art. While they hoped to open space for non-european artists representation—through gestures and postures of searching for, invitation into, and hence inclusion by documenta’s finding committee—the controversy reveals limitations of such well-intended gestures of invitation and inclusion towards non-european representation if they still sit within european institutional art spaces, their power structures, logics and knowledges. New wine surely cannot fit into old wineskins.

It also highlights the interplay of power and hierarchies between documenta and ruangrupa. On the one hand, documenta allowed space for ruangrupa’s art knowledges and practices, their ‘chaotic’ and polyphonic assembly of ‘unruly’ artists and aesthetics that caused disruption and surprise. Yet this ‘chaos’ was swiftly managed by various bodies, including documenta, state and cultural ministries intervening. On the other hand, this ‘cacophony’ of unruly artist collectives have nevertheless managed to destabilise and bring about further conversations about documenta’s setup, and its longstanding eurocentric practices, albeit for a short moment.

Thus articles for this section do not merely dwell on the controversy per se, but also point to ruangrupa’s practice of lumbung and their collaborative works with other artist collectives, as well as the body of artworks that were featured in documenta 15 which were overshadowed by the controversy. In addition with regard to the controversy at documenta 15, artist statements narrating their perspectives and experiences are also included so as to hear from them.

These materials have been included in the hope that for some of us who would want to think more about theorising or decolonial work in Southeast Asia, we would likewise not be sidetracked by the controversy. This may inadvertently end up (re)centering whiteness and its attending eurocentric histories and their logics of what makes ‘acceptable’ art histories and works from the global south. What more, since this attention is not a two-way traffic nor necessarily reciprocated as elucidated by documenta 15. At the same time, we hope to point to an option and potentialities of lumbung as another art practice, ethos and imagination from otherwise overlooked artistic sites in Southeast Asia.