Grace Samboh (b. Jakarta) lives and works either in Yogyakarta, Jakarta, or wherever her friends are at. Her work is rooted in research as it justifies her curiosity. She makes exhibitions, produces artworks, manage programs, and would like to write more. She believes that curating is about understanding and making at the same time. Her research looks at contemporary practices outside the existing centers and slowly reconnects them all with the past and central narratives.
With Hyphen— (est. 2011), her concern is to encourage arts and artistic research projects and publications in and from Indonesia. With Enin Supriyanto, Yustina Neni & Ratna Mufida, she used to run Equator Symposium (Yogyakarta Biennale Foundation, 2010-2018) where they explored the possibility of connecting equatorial countries through current life situation with an admiration to the past and optimism towards the future. Since 2019, she is direct programs in Jakarta’s RUBANAH Underground Hub.
Her recent endeavors are “Jakarta Biennale 2021: ESOK”; “Collecting Entanglements and Embodied Histories” a joint venture between Galeri Nasional Indonesia, MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Singapore Art Museum, Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, and Goethe-Institut (2021-2022); “Rewinding Internationalism: Scenes from the 1990s, today” organised by L’Internationale, and Van Abbemuseum (2022-2023), “Color Curtain and the Promise of Bandung” a series of roundtables reappraising Asian-African political imagination (2020-ongoing), and “Jejaring, Rimpang” in Pekan Kebudayaan Nasional (National Culture Week, 2023).
In speaking about “modern Indonesia,” I am thinking less in terms of chronology or style and more in terms of conviviality as practice: the everyday negotiation of languages, traditions, faiths, empires, merchants, farmers, rulers, and neighbors. The “modern” was—and remains—about relations: how to live together, how to keep conversations open, how to practice care even when histories, hierarchies, and inequalities persist.
