YVONNE OWENS, Monday Magazine, Issue 30 Vol 28, July 25 - 31, 2002

Harrowing enough to be the stuff of movies, the life and times of Indonesian-Canadian artist and activist Semsar Siahaan can’t help but flavour his art

What goes into the making of an artist, activist and political refugee? Since immigrating from Indonesia in 1999, Semsar Siahaan has succeeded in doing what even established Canadian artists have difficulty accomplishing in Victoria: securing and mounting three solo and five group shows in just three years. That alone would be a feat worth covering, but given his years of political activism, terrible personal losses and professional acclaim, the life of this 50-year-old artist deserves a closer look.

This is what democracy looks like

Born in 1952 in Medan, the capital city of Sumatra Island, Indonesia, Semsar Siahaan started making works of art very young, with his parents fully supporting his efforts from age nine. His proclivities probably came as no surprise; shortly after his birth, a tribal shaman told Siahaan’s father that his new son would become a well-respected artist. “The first time I got art lessons was in Belgrade, from 1965 to 1968,” Siahaan recalls, “when my father was an Indonesian military attaché to Yugoslavia.” In 1975, after graduating from high school, he studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute as a foreign student before moving back to Indonesia in 1977 to pursue sculpture at the Institute of Technology in West Java. In 1978, Siahaan joined Group ’78, an anti-Suharto student movement demanding that then-President Suharto not be re-elected. Suharto’s rule was experienced by Indonesian artists, intellectuals and the populace as a whole as an oppressive and corrupt regime.

Due to a protest criticising modern Indonesian art (which he felt implemented the military government’s systematic control of—and interventions in—art and culture), Siahaan was expelled from the Institute in 1981; he then led the Institute’s fine art students in a strike for freedom of expression. As a result, when Siahaan sought a solo exhibition at the Jakarta Institute of Art in 1983, he received a flat refusal from the head of the Institute. “I knew then that I was black-listed for exhibitions in any education or art institutions in Indonesia,” Siahaan recalls.

From there, he went to the Netherlands, where he began collaborating with many Dutch artists. Siahaan also became active with Indonesian ex-pat political dissidents, publishing a bulletin called For the Sake of Democracy and Human Rights in Indonesia. Upon returning to Indonesia in 1984, Siahaan lived in the slums of Jakarta. Despite the very poor conditions, however, he kept working, sometimes using the street as his studio. In 1988, he gathered together 250 drawings and 12 oil paintings on canvas to try for a solo exhibition at the Jakarta Art Centre; to his great surprise, the head of Jakarta Art Council gave him the go-ahead. The resulting exhibition became a rallying cry for Jakarta youth and students in their struggle for human rights and political reforms. Shortly thereafter, the same works were featured in a “Liberation Art” touring exhibit, seen in four cities throughout Indonesia. While these exhibitions succeeded in establishing Siahaan’s name internationally, they also resulted in the hostile attention of the police and military—including detentions and interrogations.

Unfazed by these intimidation tactics, in 1989 Siahaan began using his talents to make graphic banners and posters for actions and demonstrations by labour and human rights NGOs (non-governmental organizations) in West Jakarta; most of the proceeds from the sale of his art at this time went to the funding of these grassroots coalitions. In 1990, backed by both the Democratic Socialist Party and Greenpeace, Siahaan travelled to Australia for a six-city exhibition and lecture tour.

Acclaim, tragedy, torture, flight

Siahaan’s personal life was no less dramatic. In 1992, he married a young Muslim woman from Gayo-Aceh; their son, Christo, was born the following year, but died of a viral infection two days later. Blaming their different religious backgrounds, the marriage was annulled by his wife’s family. Calling it “the most sad and grief-filled moment in my life,” Siahaan admits that, “my former wife just can’t reject what her family wants because of her strong ethnic Muslim collective way of life.” A month later, his mother also died.

In 1994, Siahaan received the “Best in Show” award at the contemporary Indonesian art exhibition Jakarta Biennialle IX for an installation piece titled Redigging the Mass Grave which, he says, “symbolised Indonesia’s history of human rights abuses.” Initially, it was agreed that the best work would subsequently be entered into the São Paolo Biennialle in Brazil, but because of the political nature of his work, Suharto’s government cancelled any further participation by him. In June the same year, following the government’s banning of three magazines and a leading news-paper, Siahaan was involved in organising the alliance of all Indonesia’s NGOs into the Indonesian Pro-Democracy Action, a huge three-day peace demonstration.

On the third day, however, “hundreds of military reacted violently to the peaceful demonstrators,” Siahaan recalls. “Twenty-three were wounded. I was beaten up by seven soldiers [who] broke my left leg into three pieces. They threw me into the army truck, then threw me to the ground near police headquarters, [with] my left leg spinning around and in hellish pain. Two hours later an army ambulance came and took me—very roughly and by force—to the military hospital. There, they tortured me, bending my broken left leg like a ‘V.’ They set the leg improperly in a thick plaster cast and put me in isolation for two days, where a military colonel interrogated me.”

The following year, Siahaan’s career—and possibly his life—was saved by an invitation by the Singapore government to join the 1995 Modernity and Beyond exhibition. After that, he returned to Australia to attend the Asia Pacific Trade Union Conference in Perth, where he was invited to speak at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane. In 1997, Siahaan was invited to participate in Glimpses into the Future: Art in South East Asia at both the Tokyo and Hiroshima museums of contemporary art.

By this time an internationally-recognized artistic voice, Siahaan received an invitation to show in the Contemporary Art Exhibition in Kassel, Germany; but due to the escalating violence and political upheaval in Indonesia, he refused both that and a subsequent 1998 artist-in-residency in Khazakstan. It was in 1998 that Indonesian military squads began kidnapping pro-democracy activists. Dozens of youths were shot and killed in terror operations across the country that spring, including street-style executions by military snipers on the 12th of May. The next day, Jakarta exploded in riots. Activists in Siahaan’s circle learned of the military’s training of 4,000 criminals to make war on civilians.

Leaving his ruined house in Jakarta open and unlocked—it had already been ransacked by the military as an intimidation tactic—Siahaan informally bequeathed all of his possessions to looters or squatters and once again escaped to Singapore; it was from there in 1999, through a professional affiliation with the University of Victoria, that he arranged his immigration to Canada, where he was granted political asylum.

In the years since his arrival, Siahaan’s work has been seen locally at the Maltwood Gallery, Open Space, the Victoria Immigrant and Refugee Centre and the Community Arts Council Gallery; he’s been reviewed in arts, culture and politics magazines and contributed to international political debate work. Somewhat ironically, even Inside Indonesia has written about him. While he can no longer march in political demonstrations (due to his improperly-set leg), his posters, banners and signs can still be seen at anti-globalism and anti-World Bank rallies across Canada and the U.S., carried there by student activists like UVic’s Asian Students’ League.

Siahaan’s political beliefs and faith in humankind are straightforward; he refers to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice to illustrate how parliamentary democracies have now morphed into “trader’s democracies.”

“They hegemonize people’s lives globally, engineered by mega-corporate powers,” Siahaan explains. “Artists and their art take part by being hegemonized and colonized by science and technology, getting separated from life and becoming dehumanized, victimizing human life, other creatures and the environment.”

Despite a life of hardship and upheaval, Semsar Siahaan has retained a sense of both humour and love, and remains hopeful for positive change. “There is a global young people’s unity emerging to build a new, humanized life-vision through their activism and works of art.” These highly-informed perceptions can be seen in Siahaan’s newest body of work, with which he once again transcends barriers to communicate authentic emotion and integrity of expression. M