Exhibition
Fri 17 Sep–Sat 18 Dec 2021
December at the Chicago Architecture Biennial
Chicago, IL, USA
Participants
December, part of the exhibition RAISIN curated by Asha Iman Veal, at 6018North, Chicago Architecture Biennial 2021, USA
December (Wulia 2021, synchronized 3-channel video with 6-channel sound installation) is a three-part narrative work surrounding Wulia’s grandfather’s forced disappearance on 18 December 1965, in Denpasar, Bali. He was taken away—although this was never officially confirmed—during the government-sanctioned, extrajudicial mass killings of alleged communists in Indonesia that started on 1 October 1965, abetted by leading democracies of the world including the USA. Wulia was born only seven years later, but this forced disappearance as one of her first childhood stories strongly shaped her identity.
To safeguard the family as Wulia was growing up during the Suharto autocracy, these stories about 1965 were always passed on secretly, so not even Wulia’s closest friends knew her story. It was only several years after Suharto fell that Wulia began speaking about it publicly—this was in the early 2000s, and she was over thirty. Thousands, perhaps millions of families with similar experience have been legally discriminated, and the Indonesian government never acknowledges their involvement in the killings. Wulia’s grandfather was never released or returned, and his body was never found.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZyC_VP_2pU>
