ILHAM Public Lecture: Goenawan Mohamad
Channel: ILHAM Gallery
Date: 2018-12-07

TITLE: An aesthetic of Framing and Deframing - Notes on Takdir Alisyahbana and Latiff Mohidin
SPEAKER: Goenawan Mohamad

Two lives, two worlds, one long century. In telling the stories, what changes do they bring to our understanding of twentieth-century artistic and literary modernism? 

This lecture explores the lives and works of two cultural figures of Minangkabau-descent, the novelist/literary scholar Sutan Takdir Alihsjahbana (1908 – 1994) and painter/poet Latiff Mohdin (1941 - today). Born a generation apart, they also grew up on different sides of a divided Malay archipelago in diaspora communities that were both distant and intimately linked through cultural memory to the ancestral homeland of the Minangkabaus on the highlands of Sumatra.

Using a comparative approach, this lecture explores a different way to tell a history of artistic and literary modernism, rather than follow a linear account that speaks of modernism's European origin and its subsequent global spread. Instead, it explores some of the rhizomatic features in modernism to suggest that the circulation of an idea and its transformations across other time and space is unpredictable. It accounts for art's political and creative agency that is not always bounded by larger socio-political contexts and forces. In times when governmental politics (colonialism, nation-state and Konfrontasi) created boundaries and divisions, how did the ‘serumpun’ (rhizome) of modernism call forth a radically different cultural imaginary? 

Recorded on 29 September 2018

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