MEMBACA GEJALA DARI JELAGA: CURATORIAL PROJECT AND ARCHIVES EXHIBITION OF HERRY SUTRESNA

• Main Author: Hilmy Fadiansyah, Muhammad
• Format: Theses
• Language: Indonesia
• Online Access: https://digilib.itb.ac.id/gdl/view/83887
• Institution: Institut Teknologi Bandung

In the modern sense, archives are no longer associated only with objects stored from the past and cannot be published. In the context of contemporary art, archives can become objects exhibited for the dissemination of knowledge and new historical readings. This opportunity is applied in an archive exhibition project that raises the figure of Herry Sutresna as a subject for reading the discourse on the social, political, and cultural situation after the New Order. Sutresna's figure as a Bandung resident who is active in social movements, art activists, and various cross-disciplinary communities has been practicing for thirty years. Since 1994, when Sutresna joined the hip-hop group Homicide, he has significantly impacted popular culture in Bandung. His involvement in various collectives such as FAF, GMIP, PRD, Front Api, and community nodes that have autonomous spaces in Bandung formed his habitus cultivated since studying Marxism so that he has social and cultural capital in society. Various dynamics that occurred with many important events and incidents in national history have been passed by Sutresna by responding to every critical bend in the historical timeline with the cultural products created so that he can read the period of Sutresna's practice with its slices in facing the explosion of disappointment of reform and the dark period after the New Order which was felt to have no total change according to expectations, through Sutresna's habitus as an urban citizen who adopted punk culture as a means of countering ideology until Sutresna adopted an understanding of anarchism from the beginning of 2000 until the end of the research period in 2024. The formation of the method in the project titled "Reading Symptoms from Soot" underwent specific stages, including literature research, archive inventory, and interviews with Sutresna and other parties intersecting with the exhibition discourse. This exhibition is an effort to showcase a treasury sourced from Herry Sutresna's archives and documentation. His figure has provided a wealth of knowledge inheritance, particularly in the social realm, which must be presented to encourage the birth of new, more critical ideas. Through this exhibition, it is hoped to address the need for archives as a vehicle for knowledge and new readings in history that can be juxtaposed with current critical thoughts on curatorial practices. The selection of Sutresna's archives, both primary and secondary, can be presented as a medium for historical reading displayed in the exhibition space. Various categories of archival types including posters, fanzines, photo documentation, video documentation, manuscripts, representational works, souvenirs, and books become objects to read the trajectory of post-New Order history through Sutresna's approach, encompassing anarchist attitudes and thoughts via popular culture approaches.