On February 23, Indonesian painter and activist Semsar Siahaan passed away as a result of a heart attack. Siahaan was the foremost artist of the progressive movement in Indonesia and had visited Australia more than once, including to attend the Democratic Socialist Party theoretical school in 1990. Below is an excerpt from a 2002 article by Yvonne Owens, written when Siahaan was living in Canada. He had recently returned to Indonesia and was setting up a gallery in Tabanan, Bali.
Born in 1952 in Medan, Sumatra, Semsar Siahaan started making works of art very young. "The first time I got art lessons was in Belgrade, from 1965 to 1968", Siahaan recalls, "when my father was an Indonesian military attache to Yugoslavia".
In 1975, after graduating from high school, Siahaan studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute before returning to Indonesia in 1977 to pursue sculpture at the Institute of Technology in West Java. In 1978, Siahaan joined Group '78, an anti-Suharto student movement demanding that then-President Suharto not be re-elected. Suharto's rule was experienced by Indonesian artists, intellectuals and the populace as a whole as an oppressive and corrupt regime.
After a 1981 protest criticising modern Indonesian art, which Siahaan felt implemented the military government's systematic control of, and interventions in, art and culture, he was expelled from the institute. He then led the institute's fine art students in a strike for freedom of expression. As a result, he was denied a solo exhibition at the institute in 1983. "I knew then that I was blacklisted for exhibitions in any education or art institutions in Indonesia", Siahaan recalled.
From there, he went to the Netherlands and became active with Indonesian expat political dissidents, publishing a bulletin called For the Sake of Democracy and Human Rights in Indonesia. Upon returning to Indonesia in 1984, Siahaan lived in the slums of Jakarta. Despite the very poor conditions, he kept working, sometimes using the street as his studio.
In 1988, to his great surprise, Siahaan was given the go-ahead for a solo exhibition at the Jakarta Art Centre. The exhibition became a rallying cry for Jakarta youth and students in their struggle for human rights and political reforms. The same works then featured in a "Liberation Art" touring exhibit in four cities throughout Indonesia. While these exhibitions succeeded in establishing Siahaan's name internationally, they also resulted in the hostile attention of the police and military — including detentions and interrogations.
Unfazed, in 1989 Siahaan began using his talents to make graphic banners and posters for actions and demonstrations by labour and human rights NGOs in West Jakarta. In 1990, backed by both the Democratic Socialist Party and Greenpeace, Siahaan travelled to Australia for a six-city exhibition and lecture tour.
In 1992, Siahaan married a young Muslim woman from Gayo-Aceh. Their son Christo was born the following year, but died of a viral infection two days later. Blaming their different religious backgrounds, the marriage was annulled by the family of Siahaan's wife. Siahaan said it was "the most sad and grief-filled moment in my life". A month later, his mother also died.
In 1994, Siahaan received an award for an installation piece titled "Redigging the Mass Grave", which he says, "symbolised Indonesia's history of human-rights abuses". Initially, it was agreed that the winning work would be entered into the Sao Paolo Biennialle in Brazil, but because of the political nature of his work, Suharto's government cancelled any further participation by Siahaan.
In June the same year, Siahaan was involved in organising an alliance of all Indonesia's NGOs into the Indonesian Pro-Democracy Action, a huge three-day peace demonstration. On the third day, "hundreds of military reacted violently to the peaceful demonstrators", Siahaan recalled. "Twenty-three were wounded. I was beaten up by seven soldiers [who] broke my left leg into three pieces. They threw me into the army truck, then threw me to the ground near police headquarters, [with] my left leg spinning around and in hellish pain. Two hours later an army ambulance came and took me — very roughly and by force — to the military hospital. There, they tortured me, bending my broken left leg like a 'V'. They set the leg improperly in a thick plaster cast and put me in isolation for two days, where a military colonel interrogated me."
The following year, Siahaan's career — and possibly his life — was saved by an invitation by the Singapore government to join the 1995 Modernity and Beyond exhibition. After that, he returned to Australia to attend the Asia Pacific Trade Union Conference in Perth, and was invited to speak at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane. In 1997, Siahaan was invited to both the Tokyo and Hiroshima museums of contemporary art.
Siahaan was invited to exhibit his work in Germany, but due to the escalating violence and political upheaval in Indonesia, he refused both that and a subsequent 1998 artist-in-residency in Khazakstan. In 1998 Indonesian military squads began kidnapping pro-democracy activists and dozens of youths were shot and killed in terror operations across the country, including street-style executions by military snipers on May 12. The next day, Jakarta exploded in riots.
Leaving his ruined house in Jakarta open and unlocked — it had already been ransacked by the military — Siahaan informally bequeathed all of his possessions to looters or squatters and once again escaped to Singapore. In 1999 he arranged his immigration to Canada.
[Visit <http://www.geocities.com/semsar_siahaan>.]
From Green Left Weekly, March 16, 2005.
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