Events

ASAH lunchtime lecture series | After 1965: Historical Trauma and the ‘Limits of Representation’ in Indonesian Visual Arts

Wulan Dirgantoro | School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne

After 1965: Historical Trauma and the ‘Limits of Representation’ in Indonesian Visual Arts

Scholars have considered Indonesian visual arts as reflecting changes that happen within Indonesian society since its emergence in the later part of the 19th century. Indonesian artists have drawn their inspiration from historical, cultural and sociopolitical changes, both visually and conceptually. However, little scholarly attention has been paid about the aesthetic impact of these changes on the art works. The presentation will use the term ‘After 1965’ to describe the impact of historical violence on aesthetic practices of Indonesian contemporary artists.

The presentation will reflect on the issues surrounding the representation of trauma and historical violence in the practices of artists such as Tintin Wulia (b. 1971), Yaya Sung (b. 1982), Dadang Christanto (b. 1957) and Rangga Purbaya (b. 1976). These artists have explored the difficult past as a subject matter in their body of works from the anti-communist killings of 1965-66 to the anti-Chinese violence of May 1998. The presentation will consider the strategies and challenges in the representation of historical violence and trauma through a discursive approach in the practices of these artists.

Speaker Bio:

Wulan Dirgantoro is a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests are gender and feminism as well as trauma and memory in Indonesian modern and contemporary art. Her publications include Feminisms and Indonesian Contemporary Art: Defining Experiences (Amsterdam University Press, 2017) and ‘Aesthetics of Silence: Exploring Trauma in Indonesian Painting 1970-1980’ in Ambitious Alignment: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art (Power Publication and the National Gallery of Singapore, 2018). She has also contributed to various art publications in Asia, Australia and the UK on Indonesian modern and contemporary art.

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Where
Online

More information

For more information, or if you would like to present, please contact Minerva Inwald minerva.inwald@sydney.edu.au

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ASAH seminar series | What is the Chinese Language? The making of linguistic hierarchies in the People’s Republic of China

Gina Anne Tam | Trinity University in San Antonio

What is the Chinese Language? The making of linguistic hierarchies in the People’s Republic of China

Organised by the Department of Chinese Studies in collaboration with the China Studies Centre ‘Language, Literature, Culture and Education’ cluster and The Australian Society for Asian Humanities (formerly OSA).

Today, it is often presumed that there is one Chinese language- being what we in English call Mandarin– and a number of Chinese dialects, among which include better-known ones such as Cantonese or Taiwanese. But where do these designations of language and dialect come from, and what effect does this have on Chinese collective identity today? This talk will focus on how the presumption that non-Mandarin Chinese languages are nothing more than “dialects” resulted from battles over competing understandings of the Chinese nation that began in the early twentieth century and were solidified in the early years of the PRC, narrating how the legacies built decades ago built the foundation for the linguistic hierarchies that define the relationship between language and identity in China today.

About the speaker

Gina Anne Tam is an assistant professor of Chinese history at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Having received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2016, her research and teaching focuses on the construction of collective identity– national belonging, ethnicity and race– in modern China. In addition to her book Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860-1960, she has also published peer-reviewed work in Twentieth-Century China, and has written about the relevance of her work to current events in Foreign Affairs, The Nation, and Dissent. Her new project will be a global history of Chinese restauranteurs and the making of pan-Asian cuisine in the twentieth century.

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Where
Online (Zoom)
Click here to register (Eventbrite)

More information

For more information, or if you would like to present, please contact Minerva Inwald minerva.inwald@sydney.edu.au

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