110 | MAY/JUN 2017 | ISSUE 103In today’s geopolitical hotbed of activity, Tintin Wulia’s
practice seems more relevant than ever. However, as an artist who
focuses on the politics of borders, Wulia looks beyond current
events, seeking to highlight recursive patterns in history. Born in
Denpasar, Bali, in 1972, she mines her personal history as a Chinese-
Indonesian growing up in the traumatic shadows of the mass anti-
communist killings in Indonesia in 1965, as well as her own travel
experiences as an Indonesian passport holder subject to numerous
visa requirements. Her work thus employs politically iconic
objects such as the passport, the wall and the map, in interactive
installations and performances that explore imbalances in our
globalized world.
Wulia works across the globe, in Europe, the Middle East, Asia
and Australia, creating projects that are often ongoing in various
acts and stages such as her well-known passport installation
work (Re)Collection of Togetherness, shown in stages since 2007.
She has also used sound to discuss the idea of language as both a
connecting force and a political boundary, as in the narrated-poetry
installation Babel (2013), and Untold Movements – Act 1: Neitherland,
Whitherland, Hitherland (2015), a surround-sound installation
composed of stories on global nomadism and displacement.
Recently, Wulia has investigated how objects facilitate connections
across borders in projects such as “Trade/Trace/Transit” (2014–16),
which takes the cycle of cardboard waste in Hong Kong as its
starting point.
Starting in May, Wulia will represent Indonesia at the 57th Venice
Biennale with a project that transports us into a future in which
humans are living on Mars. However, rather than a sci-fi imagining
of life on the red planet, she presents a series of “twin” works
that talk about the personal experiences of borders, distance and
connectivity, family and family secrets via accounts of imagined
people living on Mars. Having worked with Wulia in 2009 to curate
her passport claw vending machine installation, Lure (2009), as part
of the exhibition “Some Rooms” at Osage Gallery in Hong Kong,
I caught up with her recently to talk more about Venice and the
evolution of her practice.You’re representing Indonesia in the 57th Venice Biennale.
Can you tell us a bit more about what you’re going to show?The project is called “1001 Martian Homes.” It places our present-
day 2017 in the past—three generations in the past, to be precise—so
it essentially looks back in time to our present. The 1001 in the title
refers to the collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian folktales
One Thousand and One Nights, in which the character Scheherazade
tells stories over consecutive nights to avoid death. In “1001 Martian
Homes,” these stories are family histories and tales of their survival.
It’s also about how these oral stories and memories have faded over
three generations or when about a century of time has passed.
There are three works in the project—Not Alone, Under the Sun
and 1001 Martian Homes. These are all interactive installations that
use video and surveillance cameras. I consider them “twin” works—
meaning they are a pair of works that exist together simultaneously
and are interconnected across two sites: one in the Indonesia
Pavilion in Venice, the other in a space at Senayan City in Jakarta
that is set up in exactly the same way as the space in Venice.What will the works be like?The object in Not Alone (2017) is like a giant 1,001-piece crystal
puzzle in the form of a two-meter-diameter transparent dome with a
triangular and hexagonal lattice. When you stand in close proximity
to the dome, the dome will respond to you, and its twin in either
Jakarta or Venice responds in exactly the same way, as though it’s
teleporting your presence across to the other site. Within the 1,001
or more modules are hundreds of small constantly glowing lights.
These small lights are mapped across the dome, representing
the stars of Sagittarius and its surrounding area in the sky, which