Bahasa Family + Nation
Ideas around the family provide a focus for examining social change taking place in Indonesia today. The younger generation of Indonesian contemporary artists reflect on personal experience to celebrate new, progressive social norms, contrasting their everyday realities with life under the repressive policies of Suharto's New Order regime and the restrictive mores of Indonesia's recent past.
Yudha 'Fehung' Kusuma Putera and Akiq AW are members of MES 56, the Yogyakarta artist collective founded in 2002 to promote photographic practice and work collaboratively with other artists and the community. Both artists have recently produced bodies of work that reflect on Suharto's family planning program, Keluarga Berencana, and contrast its restrictive guidelines with contemporary Indonesia's more inclusive versions of the family unit. In Past, present, future come together, Fehung collaborated with friends and family to create photographs of modern families that defy the Suharto regime's template for an ideal nuclear family: mother, father, son and daughter.
Through a participatory, performative process, each group creates a unique form to represent their family unit. The variations across nine photographs in the series attest to a 'new normal', liberated from the previously acceptable model to include, among others, single parents, same sex couples and cross-cultural families. In Indonesian family portraits Akiq AW presents videos of his own family, marching to the tune of the Family Planning song that accompanied Suharto's nationalistic and paternalistic program. The presence of the artist's three children proudly defies the New Order's two-child policy.
The videos are accompanied by a suite of photographs that document painted cement bas reliefs that were placed at the entrance to every town and village in Indonesia through the 1970s and 1980s to serve as propaganda for Suharto's program.
