Emilia Yang Exhibits at Ruang MES 56 Indonesia

Work by Stamps Professor Emilia Yang was featured in Conversing with Domestic Memories, an exhibition on view February 18 – 21, 2025 at Galeri Ruang MES 56 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. 

This exhibition highlights the personal memories of survivors of state violence. Although the authoritarian régime in Indonesia ended nearly 30 years ago, there is only very little space to commemorate the victims.

The concept of the exhibition is based on the idea that the Transformative Memory partners pieces will meet with other pieces from Indonesia-based artists to invite and enable conversation, reflection, and critical engagement around themes of memory in contexts of prolonged violence, such as dictatorships, war, genocide, plantation slavery and settler colonialism.

Thinking of the concept of Memory as not exclusively an account of past facts, or about individualistic reflection of history, we explore a curatorial approach for the traveling exhibit, where memory work is linked to the collective, creative and transnational. We propose that memory is always open, and builds in a constant relational, dialogical, contradictory and never-finished process. Through the exhibit, we hope to generate symbolic and collective engagements to question, contest, and reimagine memory/​futurities as a way of collective action.

This exhibition is curated by Alejandra Gaviria-Serna, Alit Ambara, Ayu Ratih, Pilar Riano-Alcala, and Rangga Purbaya, and organized by the Indonesian Institute of Social History. This initiative is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).