Asia Art Archive (AAA) and Para Site are delighted to announce the eight recipients of the Unconditional Trust: Indonesia Grant, generously supported by Ms Virginia Yee. The grantees are Bakudapan Food Study Group (Yogyakarta), Aliansyah Caniago (Bandung), Indeks (Bandung), Jordan, jordan Édition (Jakarta), Studio Malya (Yogyakarta), Queer Indonesia Archive (Indonesia), Riwanua (Makassar), and Udeido Collective (West Papua).
Unconditional Trust: Indonesia offers each recipient an unrestricted grant of US$10,000, which aims at providing foundational support for long-term visions, and to encourage sustainable practices in overhead, operations, and infrastructure. The grant generates new perspectives on community-building and positive structural change within the field of visual art. Through collaborations with the Indonesian art community, AAA and Para Site foresee the positive impact of this grant on our engagement with long-term, sustainable art practices and projects, contributing to the development of local art ecologies across the Asia-Pacific region.
The grant recipients were nominated by Indonesian arts practitioners: KUNCI (collective, Yogyakarta), Sanne Oorthuizen (curator, Yogyakarta/Amsterdam), ruangrupa (collective, Jakarta), Aaron Seeto (Director, Museum MACAN), Alia Swastika (curator & researcher, Yogyakarta), Tromarama (collective, Jakarta/Bandung), Farah Wardani (curator, Jakarta), and Tintin Wulia (artist & researcher, Denpasar/Brisbane/Gothenburg).
The grantees were selected by a jury composed of philanthropists based in Indonesia and Southeast Asia: Belinda Tanoto (Shanghai/Singapore), Benedicta M Badia Nordenstahl (Singapore/Chicago), Henny Scott (Melbourne/Singapore), Noorani Sukardi and Gulah Sukardi (Jakarta/London), and Virginia Yee (New York/Hong Kong).
AAA and Para Site’s concern for the arts ecosystem in Asia can be traced back to the two organisations’ earliest joint symposium held in 2001, “Space Traffic: Artist-Run Spaces Beyond a Local Context.” Building on recent engagements with Indonesia, the country has been selected for this edition of the grant. AAA collaborated with Jakarta-based collective Gudskul on The Collective School (2022–23), while Para Site has also featured artists, curators, and researchers in its residencies, international conferences, publications, exhibitions, and Workshops for Emerging Arts Professionals.
Unconditional Trust: Indonesia is made possible through Ms Virginia Yee’s support, with the intent to motivate greater philanthropy for local artists and communities. Yee, a prominent supporter of the arts, boasts twenty years of experience in the financial sector, and established the first women’s bank in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 1980. Yee’s long-held interest in education and philanthropy is demonstrated by her initiation and sponsorship of two editions of Para Site’s NoExit Grant for Unpaid Artistic Labour from 2020–21. The current initiative supports arts education and hopes to inspire others to support their local art ecologies through Yee’s generosity.
About the Grant Recipients
Bakudapan Food Study Group
Bakudapan Food Study Group is a collective of eight members exploring food as a gateway to research socio-political issues. With the grant, they aim to expand their solidarities with their network through residencies, forums, workshops, publications, and collective pot-making. Their board game, Hunger Tales, reflects on social, political, and ecological issues to uncover inequalities in arts systems, redistribute access, and amplify values while learning and empowering each other.
Aliansyah Caniago
Residing between Indonesia and the UK, Aliansyah Caniago’s practice addresses conflicts to restore damaged environments, integrating site-specific interventions, installations, and durational performances. Focusing on Barus, a North Sumatran village named after an extinct camphor tree, the project delves into Indonesia’s modernity, exploring indigenous knowledge lost to colonial practices. With the grant, Caniago aims to accelerate research on North Sumatra, reclaiming insights into camphor trees and community relationships, to deepen the understanding of intertwined contemporary identities and historical legacies.
Indeks
Initiated in February 2020 in Bandung, Indonesia, Indeks is a curatorial platform to cultivate dialogues and promote knowledge exchange through artistic activities. Their programmes span library and crowd-sourced archive initiatives, exhibitions, residencies, and film and moving image programmes. With the grant, Indeks will focus on creating learning instruments for local communities, developing artists’ careers by providing space and time for experimentation, a “comeback” programme for artists on a hiatus, as well as providing opportunities for capacity building through training and encounters.
Jordan, jordan Édition
Jordan, jordan Édition is an independent publisher, with a dedicated focus on Indonesian artists. Their publication aims to initiate conversations around contested topics, challenge social stigmas, and support marginalised communities in Indonesia. With the grant, they will continue ongoing projects temporarily halted due to financial constraints, including “SUSU Zine Project,” a photo zine focusing on feminism in Indonesia, and two new publications from upcoming artists that revolve around their identities as a minority in Indonesia.
Studio Malya
Established in 2017, Studio Malya explores Indonesia’s sociocultural dynamics through generational and youth perspectives. Influenced by sociopolitical changes, Indonesian art’s dynamic history sees emerging post-studio practices engaging with local communities to produce various outcomes based on the local context. With the grant, Studio Malya aims to conduct ethnographic research on Indonesian artists’ practices in the context of social work, mapping and exploring actor positions, connections to issues, and knowledge production within emerging post-studio practices.
Queer Indonesia Archive
Founded in January 2020, the Queer Indonesia Archive (QIA) is a community-based volunteer collective committed to the collection, preservation, and celebration of material reflecting the lives and experiences of the LGBTQIA+ community. QIA documents and makes accessible Indonesian queer histories. With this grant, QIA will continue building sustainable, safe, and transparent organisational practices, and will create more opportunities for creative engagement with their growing collection—with a focus on regional and marginalised areas of Indonesia.
Riwanua
Based in Makassar, South Sulawesi, Indonesia, Riwanua works to disseminate knowledge through cross-disciplinary practice, conversation, research, artistic work and residencies, archives, screening, publishing, and through their physical and digital library. This grant will be utilised to organise a series of programmes on researching, archiving, and documenting ephemeral audio recordings, photographs, moving images, and texts that capture traces of sociocultural changes, embodying knowledge related to South Sulawesi specifically, and east Indonesia more broadly.
Udeido Collective
Initiated in 2018, Udeido Collective is a visual artist collective from West Papua engaging in issues of emancipation, human rights, and freedom through visual expression. With a belief that collectivity is crucial for resistance and healing, Udeido will use the grant to engage the community through new projects, rebuilding the Khombobulu, and transforming traditional concepts of education. By collaborating with local teachers, they hope to shape a better educational landscape for marginalised urban children in Jayapura.