Art Smashing Tyranny: The Formation of Taring Padi

Join us for a presentation and discussion on the early years of Taring Padi, the Indonesian collective of art workers founded in Yogyakarta in 1998.

Alexander Supartono, art historian and first-generation member of Taring Padi, reflects on the formation and formulation of iconographies, symbols, and slogans in the works of the collective during their first five years (1997 – 2002). The presentation will be followed by a conversation with Vera Mey, art historian and independent curator.

Against the backdrop of Indonesia’s 30-year anti-communist pogrom, Taring Padi emerged in the late 1990s carrying the flag of social realism, a commitment manifested in the intricate details of the collective’s large-scale banners. 

This lecture will reconstruct the revival of the Left’s pictorial commonplace by examining graffiti, fragments of drawings, and paintings on the walls of a former art school building, which members of Taring Padi squatted between 1998 and 2002. Functioning as an ideological and artistic laboratory, those walls recorded the individual expression of Taring Padi’s members, which were subsequently transformed into collective works through collective labour. This lecture also considers their zine from the same period, Terompet Rakyat, as another site of this visual revival of the Left, highlighting the foundation of Taring Padi’s artistic practices in utilising art as political tools.