Arts

  Alexandra Crosby

The role of design in social change has received increasing public attention in the last decade. User-centred, iterative, participatory flexible approaches to the design of objects, spaces, communications, services and experiences are valued by policy makers and firms all over the world to address issues of social justice, sustainability and urban development. Simultaneously the territory within which design operates has been changing. Design is sometimes used synonymously with consumerism, urban tastes, and globalisation, such as ‘designer handbags’, but what design is and what it does is much more complex, and many of these new definitions of design are emerging in Indonesia.

Essays and Fiction is a new series of writing in Inside Indonesia that aims to give voice to more personal stories about Indonesia. We welcome submissions in the form of reflective pieces, fiction, artwork, or essays about travel and fieldwork experiences.

The edge of Merah-Putih

A link to Australia’s support of the Indonesian revolution

Not even Mount Kelud erupting could stop Yogyakarta's activists from standing up against violence to women as part of One Billion Rising

A nearly extinct rural Sundanese art form is being revived in an urban setting

Indonesia at the Venice Biennale, 2013

Pulang'sauthor reflects on writing the stories of those unseen and unheard

Leila S. Chudori’s novel Pulang is an important addition to a growing literature examining the events of 1965-66 and its aftermath

Margaret Kartomi’s life-long devotion to bringing Sumatran music to the world is revealed in her major contribution to analysing and preserving this musical heritage

Theatre therapy in a narcotics gaol is helping inmates survive

Two young Solo poets believe poetry should serve the people

This Indian film’s popularity reveals a popular critique of the US

Recent ground-breaking publications, an internationally award-winning film and a major conference are opening up new truths about Indonesia’s past

Joshua Oppenheimer’s groundbreaking new film raises disturbing questions about why perpetrators of the 1965-66 mass killings still enjoy impunity for their actions

The filmmaker explains that The Act of Killing exposes the imagination of terror

Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is a bold, disturbing and ultimately unsatisfactory exploration of the place of violence in modern Indonesia

The generation of artists rising after Reformasi is failing to create meaning outside the art market

Budi Brahmantyo continues a lineage of scientific art for which West Java’s natural resources have provided the subject

Indonesian artists are using new media to rethink urban space