Bahasa Akiq AW
Akiq AW is a member of Yogyakarta’s photography collective MES 56, which has made important contributions to the development of contemporary photography in Indonesia and its critical discourses. MES 56 functions as a true community, providing a platform for serious discussions and collective actions around art by publishing books, curating exhibitions, hosting workshops and residencies for young artists, and taking part in international art exhibitions.
AW’s photographic works are dominated by his obsession with the ‘everyday life tactics’ that ordinary Indonesians have developed to survive in society. These tactics allow them to develop aesthetic ideas in their own ways, often producing artefacts that resemble artworks by real artists. In AW’s photographic essay The order of things 2008–11, he captures the deliberate composition and rich colour palette of these found artworks and installations in the Indonesian landscape. This lifts them out of the ordinary and reveals a potent collective discourse constructed by the residents out of their everyday life experience.
The artist’s Indonesian family portraits series 2017 is a series of photographs of small-scale reliefs that were built as part of New Order government’s Keluarga Berencana (KB) (Family Planning) program. KB was one of the regime’s biggest claims to fame, rolled out with a massive propaganda campaign that idealised the image of a nuclear family with two children, a boy and a girl. For over two decades, these unique painted reliefs in a variety of designs could be found in every village from Sabang, the westernmost part of Indonesia, to its easternmost tip, Merauke. The regime used the image to brainwash ordinary Indonesians, forcing them to believe in a rigid set of family values.
Reformasi spelt the end of the regime in 1998 and after that KB propaganda ran out of juice. Remnants of the reliefs can still be found all over the archipelago, but younger Indonesians often have no idea what they meant or what they were used for. For the Indonesian family portraits series, AW visited villages in Java to document the remains of this collective memory. A video that accompanies the work, Langkah kecilku langkah besarmu, shows how ordinary Indonesians reimagined and developed their own interpretations of the ‘ideal’ family: the artist poses with his wife and three children (all girls) in a recreation of the famous KB reliefs, scored with the official ‘KB Anthem’ that used to be a mainstay of government radio and TV in the 1970s and 1980s.
Alia Swastika
