The Venice Biennale reports. Part 1: Angels, giant lizards and a Trojan horse

Voyage – Trokomod. Photo by Luciano Romano Courtesy of Bumi Purnati Indonesia

I finally made it to the Venice Bienniale this week. I hadn’t set foot there for years. My number one preoccupation, as soon as i had dropped my bag at the hotel, was to locate the Pavilion of the Indonesian Republic. It’s at the Arsenale, I had seen a photo of it. Some kind of rusty dinosaur with angels flying around it.

It turns out there was no dinosaur but a cross between the Trojan Horse and a Komodo dragon, a large species of lizard found in Indonesia. Called “Trokomod”, this 4 meter tall and 7.5 meter long amphibious vessel was created by Heri Dono to explore the place of his country in a globalized world. “Indonesia has for most of the time been a blank spot on the world map, he said, now is the time to speak up.”

Visitors can enter the Trokomod, play with a submarine-like periscope and look through telescopes that reveal mysterious scenes of European culture: faces of people wearing eighteenth-century curly wigs, a prosthetic leg used in the First World War, a copy of Karl Marx’s Capital, etc. They are presented as exotic pieces in an ethnographic museum. Which makes for an amusing reversal of the roles as it is usually Western museums that collect and interpret ‘exotic’ artefacts found in distant countries.

Dono’s critical vision of the Western world doesn’t end there. His installation also denounces Western hegemony of the global contemporary art, the way it dictates its rules, codes and important protagonists.

Voyage – Trokomod and The Telescopes. Photo by Luciano Romano Courtesy of Bumi Purnati Indonesia

Processing of Voyage

His creatures are made out of scrap metal collected in the junkyards of Bandung and Yogyakarta, they were crafted in collaboration with architects and local artisans from Indonesia.

As for the silver flying vessels, they are described in the curatorial text as follows: Angels derived from stories when he was a kid had nothing to do with religion, rather he was inspired by Flash Gordon comic strip, as he asserts that it arrived on the moon before Neil Armstrong, meaning that imagination is faster than reality. Angles became an early metaphor for freedom and dreams. “Angels are free to fly wherever they want”. But his angels, made of wood with flapping wings, a low-tech device and gender genitalia that were first created at a time of hopeful freedom, were soon flying in a cocoon, followed by a series caught in a trap and even broken in the next series, and recently facing the future, all in parallel with the social and political situation of the country.

The pavilion of the Indonesian Republic turned out to be far more interesting than i had expected. It presents an art that is capable of being visually attractive to the broad public, an art that has some humour, understands its role in society, is critical of the status quo and attempts to challenge it.