A series of articles on popular culture and the arts

Bart Barendregt

Artists gather at 2006 meeting in Solo to defend freedom    of artistic expression    Gong Magazine (redaksi@gong.tikar.or.id)

Ten years after the fall of Suharto’s New Order regime, the map of arts and culture in Indonesia has been dramatically redrawn. But many of us now take the new situation so much for granted that it is often difficult to see the changes that have taken place. Over the coming weeks, Inside Indonesia will run a series of three articles that explore different aspects of the changing nature of arts and culture in Indonesia.

First, Jennifer Lindsay’s introductory overview set the scenes starting in 1998, when the arts in Indonesia were still operating under strong centralised control and political repression, and the biggest threat to performers and artists was the heavy hand of the state. Centralised state control and channels for support for the arts have now altered or disappeared, and artists’ fear of intervention is more likely to come from self-appointed morality police of rightist Islam. This introduction gives a brief overview of some of these changes.

Next week, a contribution by Amrih Widodo will discuss the ways Islam has been transformed into a commodity fetish in the Indonesian culture market. Trend setters, including authors of popular Islamic books, have helped to reshape Islamic beliefs and the everyday practices of ordinary Muslims. Then artist Tintin Wulia will provide a moving account of how the personal and the political interact in her own work.

These articles were first presented at the conference ‘Ten Years After’, University of Amsterdam, 22-23 May 2008 (http://www.kitlv.nl/conference.pdf ). We hope you enjoy the insights about contemporary Indonesian arts and culture that they provide.     ii

Bart Barendregt (BARENDREGT@fsw.leidenuniv.nl) teaches anthropology at Leiden University.