Throughout the past month, I managed to gain useful and interesting knowledge from multiple classes, combined, I think it can help me to make a program for the next 5 – 10 years for the cultural house I’m involved in.
I have been playing with the idea of making an exhibition for my Final Project. Although I have never been involved in the process of developing an exhibition from the curatorial side, it has been a long time interest of mine.
Coming from art and culture education and public programing background, I always revolve my work around the exhibition. However, I am interested with the idea of “What if it was reversed?, what will happen if the exhibition revolves around the education and public programs instead?”
For that I have brainstormed and come up with several ideas of public program, which can be seen below:
Children’s Program: “Sajen: Gifts to the Spirits”
Format: Interactive Workshop
Target Audience: Children (Ages 6–12)
Objective: Introduce children to the cultural significance of Sajen (offerings) through storytelling and creative activities.
Description
This hands-on workshop invites children to explore the idea of Sajen (traditional offerings made to spirits and ancestors in Indonesian culture). The session begins with a storytelling segment, explaining the importance of Sajen and the values behind the offerings, such as respect for nature and spiritual balance. Children will then participate in a craft session where they create their own symbolic offerings using flowers, leaves, and natural materials, reflecting the cultural elements they’ve learned. The workshop ends with a sharing circle, where children explain what their creations symbolize.
Outcome: Children will understand the cultural importance of Sajen while exercising their creativity. They will develop an appreciation for traditional practices and learn how such customs can be meaningful in the modern world. Furthermore, the accompanying guardians who are encouraged to craft Sajen together with the children participants will hopefully gain a deeper understanding of Sajen beyond its mystical connotations, appreciating its cultural roots and the lessons it offers about balance, gratitude, and reverence in today’s world. The program aims to foster a broader discussion on how cultural practices can be adapted and respected in a contemporary context.
Reclaiming the Past: A Film Screening and Panel Discussion
Format: Film Screening + Panel Discussion
Target Audience: General Public
Objective: Provoke reflection on how cultural heritage and traditional practices can coexist with modern society, encouraging a deeper appreciation for traditional and/or indigenous values.
Description
Screening of a film or documentary that showcases how traditional practices have been altered by modernization and external influences. This will be followed by a panel discussion featuring cultural practitioners, historians, and artists who will explore the themes of the film in relation to Indonesian culture and the exhibition. The public will be encouraged to engage in an open dialogue with the panel.
Outcome: Attendees will reflect on the balance between preserving traditional values and embracing modernity, with an understanding of the challenges posed by external hegemonic influences.
Now for Tomorrow: Re-contextualizing & Re-establishing Culture
Format: Panel Discussions
Target Audience: University Students and Academia
Objective: Delve deeper into the academic discourse around decolonization, re-contextualization and re-establishment of traditional and indigenous knowledge.
Description
This panel discussion will bring together academics, students, and cultural practitioners to explore the themes of the exhibition through a scholarly lens. The discussion begins with keynote speakers discussing bottom – up decolonization approach in the context of Southeast Asian and global cultures, followed by panel discussions on topics such as the role of myth in pre-colonial societies, the impact of education colonialism on traditional and indigenous knowledge, and the contemporary relevance of traditional cultural practices.
Outcome: Participants will leave the panel discussion with a richer understanding of the intersections between culture, colonization, and modern knowledge systems, hopefully some participants can connect and potentially start or collaborate in a research or project together.
Based on the programs I brainstormed, classes I attended, readings I’m struggling to keep up with, and ideas that emerges from conversations, I came up with the curatorial rationale of an exhibition below:
Curatorial Rationale
A Chaotic Place We’re Heading: Now for Aeons to Come aims to confront the paradox that arise when a society glorifies its heritage while simultaneously participating in its destruction. In Indonesia, much of our traditional culture has been altered or undermined by the dominance of Western knowledge systems and imported religious ideologies, often in the name of modernization and/or being civilized. This exhibition seeks to reclaim, re-contextualize, and re-establish the original values embedded within Indonesia’s traditional practices and values that have been overshadowed and distorted by these hegemonic forces.
The exhibition will invite visitors to examine how Indonesian society has both upheld and damaged its own cultural legacy. By placing emphasis on grassroots knowledge and indigenous practices, we seek to reverse imposition of “modern” perspectives that often dismiss traditional knowledge as irrational or obsolete. Superstitions and myths, for example, are not simply relics of a primitive past. They served as tools for our ancestors to rationalize and navigate the natural and socio-cultural environment long before the coming of Western science.
The exhibition attempts to experiment with a Bottom-Up approach, where the discourse is driven by the very communities whose practices and traditions have been marginalized, rather than the Top-Down approach where decolonization is viewed as a process we must undertake and merely turn into an intellectual endeavor. The exhibition will try to propose that decolonization is the natural outcome of re-establishing and re-contextualizing the cultural values and practices that were suppressed. As we revive these traditional and indigenous narratives, we move towards a more authentic decolonization, one that restores agency to the previously colonized society.
By juxtaposing traditional artifacts and contemporary artworks, the exhibition serves as both a critique and celebration of Indonesian culture. Furthermore, it extends to the political realm where the persistence of political dynasties, which continue to thrive in Indonesia, rooted in the preservation of feudalism since the birth of the Republic. These political dynamics have perpetuated a cycle where cultural practices are simultaneously glorified for their symbolic value, yet stripped of their original meaning and purpose in daily life, ending with the industrialization and commodification of culture and heritage.
In the end, the exhibition is a question on how can we maintain the value of our heritage and cultural practices without stripping them of their original purpose and meaning?
For those who perhaps did not know, I am developing the idea based on Javanese culture (one of the very many cultures in Indonesia), that is because as a Javanese I don’t feel comfortable to “speak” on behalf of other Indonesian Culture for fear of cultural appropriation.
However, I am also aware that the ideas I came up with is also not perfect and may be not factual from Javanese perspective, which emphasizes the suppression of traditional knowledge and practices by colonialism in education, arrival of foreign religious belief, and hegemony of Western education perspectives I mentioned in the curatorial rationale.
Through this project, I don’t seek to give answer or solution on the problems faced by the preservation of heritage and culture, or even decolonization discourse and effort. On the contrary, I would like to ask question and spark discussion on how can we use them in contemporary context? I believe that genuine collective effort will enable us to find not solution, but a better sustainable and equitable approach to maintain what we have now, for aeons to come.
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