Soekarno kehilangan lukisan

(Soekarno Loss his Paintings)

An artwork which examinating about one of Indonesian visual art history, focusing in year between 1940-1960. This project departed from Soekarno’s collection of paintings. Soekarno is founding fathers of Indonesian nationalist and former Indonesian president, also a huge national collector.

This project developed from my previous “KW 2”, started in 2010. “KW 2” had an initial idea to exploring about contemporary visual art issues, mostly between the painting and printmaking in Indonesia. In this project I opened any possibilities and had experimenting from the idea, form and how to present it. After this project, I have been interested in some issues, which also became my curiosity, some points are :

1.There is lack and no function of state/national museum as a formal and establish art insttution, in a role to public education about art, both in history and contemporary. 

2. There is no system or very bad system from state to maintaining of national collection, also in Soekarno’s collection. Many of them are unacounted and unknown where them are. Some rumours said, it’s sold by smuggled.

I am interested to started this project one of Soekarno collection of painting by Rudolf Bonet, depicting about harvesting. In this painting there were some of figure that I borrow to convey the story based on my intepretation.

In my opinion, this issue is important because the disappearance of these paintings collection not only by physically which not able to seen and appreciated anymore. In Soekarno era, who was also known as one of the best collectors, artists have an important role to convey their nation, mostly about nationalist and mediated by their artworks.

This also can portray about the loss of art history and common knowledge, mostly about nationalism which had became the main issue at that era. The shaping of Indonesian nationalism in a certain sense was formed by the visual art, also inseparable from the role of the artists. In this project I am interested to discuss about the state institution and art system of art and their role to disseminate knowledge of Indonesian art history.