In 2015, I as a student alongside my peers at Yogyakarta Indonesian Institute of the Arts organized a collective exhibition for art students coming from JABODETABEK (Jakarta and its connecting cities) area. The exhibition was titled “Hello Batavia #2!”, a continuation of the previous event, and borrowing the old Dutch name of Jakarta (Batavia) with a curatorial focus on highlighting the culture and urban reality of Jakarta. For this event, I made my first attempt at art installation by combining my then-focus on Chirico’s Metaphysica and various objects (some modified, some are left in their found state) to create an immersive room that speaks of one collective phenomenon I observed happening in the daily life of the urban population : the collective amnesia, and at times downplaying, of the 1965 purge.

In a dim-lit room, painted in earth tones, pieces of white mannequins—some with only the torso, the other only the head—were placed in pedestal and wheelchair, symbolizing forgotten souls of the victims. The wheelchair itself, rusted and ancient as it was, served as a symbol of the ‘elder’ (predecessors, lost relatives from the past, etc.). A series of wooden frames were placed on the wall, creating an impression of windows and surrounded by numbers, letters, and the sentence “Memento Mei” repeated multiple times.