Internationally practicing curator/researcher/writer Alia Swastika will share her curatorial process as part of the curatorial team of the currently ongoing Sharjah Biennale 2025: To Carry. She will discuss her rationale and approach in her curatorial work for the Biennale, and focus on several of the artists, particularly connected to women’s knowledge and herstory, social movements and indigenous cultural practices. Alia will also expand on her work with the collaborative project Concrete Thread Repertoires, which she presents as part of the Biennale.
About Alia Swastika
Alia Swastika is a curator, researcher and writer whose practice over the last ten years has expanded on issues and perspectives of decoloniality and feminism. Her different projects involve decentralising art, rewriting art history and encouraging local activism. She works as the Director of the Biennale Jogja Foundation, Yogyakarta, and continues her research on Indonesian female artists during Indonesia’s New Order. She established and was Program Director for Ark Galerie, Yogyakarta (2007–2017). She was co-curator for the Biennale Jogja XI Equator #1 (2011); co-artistic director of the 9th Gwangju Biennale (2012), “roundtable” and curator for contemporary art exhibitions for the Europalia Arts Festival (2017), including presentations at Oude Kerk, Amsterdam; M HKA, Antwerp; and SMAK Ghent, Belgium. Her research on Indonesian women artists during the New Order was published in 2019. She is part of curatorial team of Sharjah Biennale 16 2025.
Presentation of Alia Swastika as curator of the Sharjah Biennale 2025
About Sharjah Biennale 2025
Concrete Thread Repertoires: archiving activism
This project surveys the potential of citizens’ movements in Indonesia from two interrelated viewpoints: the citizens’ repertoire of political action (including the motifs, tropes and techniques of negotiations and resistance) and the material supports of activism (comprising both natural and artificial objects that archive, mediate or bear witness to conflict). Assembled by artists, researchers and related communities, this archive brings together selected case studies from a wide variety of sociocultural backgrounds, connected by the shared experience of ‘emergency activism’ (a notion coined by scholar Melanie Budianta to foreground the urgent character of civilian uprisings). The Concrete Thread Repertoires document instances of political resistance in a perpetual state of emergency, whether in a more recent period (post-1998 Indonesia) or over a hundred years back (as in the case of the anti-capitalist Samin movement). These examples offer glimpses of enduring hope, while sharing ways of knowing, doing, and engaging for the future.
Concrete Thread Repertoires is a collaborative work of Ugoran Prasad, Wimo Ambala Bayang, Agnesia Linda Mayasari, Komunitas Kendeng, Komunitas Wadas, Harwati, and Mothers of Mollo, presented as part of Sharjah Biennale 16 2025 “To Carry”.
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Alia Swastika’s presentation at the HDK-Valand – Academy of Art and Design’s Spring Cluster Days is supported through the ERC-funded project Things for Politics’ Sake: Aesthetic Objects and Social Change (THINGSTIGATE, ERC, 101041284).
