Keynote Speaker
Arahmaiani Feisal
Arahmaiani is an internationally renowned and respected contemporary Indonesian artist. Born in Bandung in 1961 and based in Yogyakarta, she became widely recognised in the 1980s and 1990s as a pioneering Southeast Asia activist and performance artist. She uses drawing, sculpture, video, poetry, and dance to raise critical awareness of environmental issues and injustices of violence against women. Her complex and nuanced work grapples with contemporary politics, violence, critique of capital, the female body and her own identity. Although Muslim, her work mediates between Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, and animist traditions, forming a multisensory medium for communication and cooperation.
Arahmaiani was a featured artist in the Indonesia National Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale (2003). Since 2006, her community-based art projects have focused on environmental issues, including work with an Islamic boarding school in Yogyakarta and with Tibetan communities in the Tibet Plateau since 2010.
Her artwork has been presented globally, including at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, the Singapore Art Museum, and recently, her work Burning Country (1999) was performed at the Tate Modern in London (2024). She also teaches at Passau University in Germany.
The Flag Project (2006-)
The Flag Project began after the 2006 Yogyakarta earthquake. Engaging diverse communities, Arahmaiani mediated dialogues on life and belonging, creating colorful flags with keywords reflecting community values. Performances where community members parade these flags through local streets create a mobile, symbolic gesture of harmonizing differences and social healing. This process has since been replicated in cities across Asia, Australia, and Europe.
The project has also come to work to deal with real problems facing community life, mostly environmental, using an interdisciplinary approach which connects them to social, cultural, and political activities and processes. The Flag Project is an ongoing series of performances and exhibitions. It functions as an 'open art system' where flags are paraded with traditional music, allowing communities to express their thoughts. This project thus has a practical side that aims to find alternative and creative solutions to the problems these communities face.
