Respondents & Moderators

Andi Achdian

Achdian is a lecturer at the Sociology Department, Faculty of Political and Social Science, Universitas Nasional in Jakarta. In addition to his academic work, he is also active as a national member of the executive board of Masyarakat Sejarawan Indonesia, Managing Editor of Jurnal Sejarah and member of Jakarta’s Heritage Expert Team. Achdian is also museum curator and supervisor for the development of Omah Munir human rights museum in Indonesia. His interests are concentrated on colonial history, nationalism and the anticolonial movement at the turn of the twentieth century in the Dutch Indies.

Ayu Utami

Ayu is an award-winning Indonesian writer who was a laureate of the Prince Claus Award (2000) and the Ahmad Bakrie Award for Literature (2018). During Indonesia's military regime, Ayu was a journalist and activist for freedom of the press. She was one of the founders of the Alliance of Independent Journalists, later banned by the military regime. In Indonesia’s democratic political system, she believes that religious radicalism constitutes the main challenge to freedom of expression. She also serves as Director of Literature & Ideas Festival at Salihara and Program Director of Komunitas Utan Kayu.

Brigitta Isabella

Brigitta is affiliated with KUNCI Cultural Studies Center, a research collective based in Yogyakarta that works through creative experimentation and speculative inquiry with a focus on the intersections between theory and practice. In 2014, Brigitta initiated From Bandung to Berlin, an open and shared artistic platform of collaboration that revolves around the interval of historical space and time between the first Konferensi Asia Afrika in Bandung (1955) and the fall of Berlin Wall in (1989). 

Grace Samboh

Grace is in search of what comprises curatorial work within her surrounding scene. She jigs within the existing elements of the arts scene around her, as she considers the claim that Indonesia is lacking art infrastructure, especially state-owned or run, to be an outdated position. She believes that curating is about understanding and making at the same time. In 2011 she co-founded Hyphen, a closed-door discussion group that seeks to sew together bit by bit the fragmented Indonesian history of art by (re)reading Indonesian contemporary practices and putting them into their own historical context. She is a programmer for the Equator Symposium of the Yogyakarta Biennale (2012-2022).

Hilmar Farid

Hilmar Farid is a historian, academic and activist. He was appointed as the first Director General of Culture at the Ministry of National Education and Culture (2015), having had no previous government career background. He co-founded the Jaringan Kerja Budaya (1994) and published the periodic printed publication Media Kerja Budaya. Hilmar also co-founded and chaired Institut Sejarah Sosial Indonesia (2002-2007) and acts as chairman of the Praxis association (since 2012). He is active in the Asian Regional Exchange for New Alternatives (ARENA) and the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society as editor.

Manneke Budiman

Budiman teaches Literature and Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Humanities, Universitas Indonesia. He currently serves as Associate-Dean for Academic, Research, and Student Affairs. His research interests include Southeast Asian studies, gender studies, youth and popular culture, contemporary Indonesian literature and literacy studies. His ongoing research is concerned with globalization and local responses to it, in relation to the formation of identity and nationality. Together with Abidin Kusno, he is working on their forthcoming publication, Time, Power, and Mobility in Urban Spatial Politics in Indonesia (Palgrave).

Marco Kusumawijaya

Marco is an architect and urbanist. In the past 30 years he has worked in the fields of architecture, arts, urban sustainability and housing in various locations in Indonesia and Southeast and East Asia. He was chair of the Jakarta Arts Council (2006-2010). He has also curated a number of exhibitions and artist residencies programmes, as well as serving in advisory capacities for arts organisations in several countries. He co-founded Rujak Centre for Urban Studies (2010) and served as its executive director. Since 2018, he was appointed as chair of the Coastal Management Committee of Jakarta Governor’s Delivery Unit. He has been involved in conferences on arts and sustainable urbanism in cities in Indonesia and abroad.  

Simon Soon

Soon is a Senior Lecturer in Art History at the Cultural Centre, University of Malaya. His broader areas of interest include comparative modernities in art, urban histories, and art historiography. He has written on various topics related to 20th-century art across Asia and occasionally curates exhibitions. He is the Penang Field Director of Site and Space in Southeast Asia, a research project funded by the Getty Foundation Connecting Art Histories initiative. He is also an editorial member of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia and team member of the Malaysia Design Archive. 

Bambang Harymurti

Since the early 1980s, Harymurti has been working as a journalist covering regional and international news for several media outlets including TIME Magazine, Media Indonesia Daily and the Tempo Weekly News magazine. Harymurti was the Chief Executive Officer and Corporate Chief Editor of Tempo International Media. He has received many fellowships, including a Fulbright Fellowship and a New Generation Fellowship at the East West Center. He has also received numerous awards, including an Excellence in Journalism award from the Indonesian Observer Daily (1997) and the PWI Jawa Timur Pena Award (2006).

Kwartarini Wahyu Yuniarti

Since 1990, Yuniarti served at Faculty of Psychology, Universitas Gadjah Mada from Associate Professor to a Vice Dean for Research, Cooperation and Alumni. Professionally, she is associated with the International Network of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, the Network of Humanitarian Action, the Indonesian Psychological Association, and the Asian Association of Social Psychology. After having received her Doctorate Degree from the Faculty of Psychology, Hamburg University, Germany (2004), Yuniarti is still very active in researching, presenting and publishing both in Indonesia and abroad. Her main research interests are the fields of health psychology, indigenous psychology, and cross-cultural psychology.

Melani Budianta

Well known as a literary critic, especially in gender, cultural, and postcolonial studies, Budianta has published a number of scientific papers, which are adopted as a chapter in internationally published books. She holds positions including, international journal editor of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Routledge; editorial board member of anthology at PALA (Project of American Literature in Asia) and is a fellow at Asian Regional Exchange for New Alternative (ARENA). Budianta is currently a lecturer at the Faculty of Humanities, Universitas Indonesia.

Philippe Pirotte

Pirotte is an art historian and curator. He is the Dean of the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste Städelschule and Director of Portikus in Frankfurt am Main. Next to that he serves as Adjunct Senior Curator at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and as visiting professor at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He co-founded the Antwerp contemporary art center objectif-exhibitions (1999) and was director of Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland (2005-2011). Pirotte held the position of Senior Advisor at the Rijksakademie for Visual Arts in Amsterdam (2004-2013). He was curator of La Biennale de Montréal (2016) and member of the curatorial team of the Jakarta Biennale (2017).