The art of repair: naming violence in the work of FX Harsono

Abstract

Since the end of authoritarian rule in Indonesia in 1998 and the anti-Chinese violence that attended it, the artist FX Harsono has created a series of works addressing the name as a site of racialized state violence, cultural identity, erasure, recovery, and repair. Through an examination of Harsono’s works, this article asks: How can art put forward a reparative vision in a context of impunity, forgetting, and ongoing discrimination? How do the sonic and visual qualities of ethnic Chinese names register affective claims of resilience and survival against a backdrop of violence and loss? Rather than focus on exposing past harms or demanding redress, Harsono’s artworks render visible the quiet, partial, and persistent repair-work undertaken within the ethnic Chinese community in the aftermath of violence, and use these practices as an idiom for an art of repair addressed to the broader Indonesian community.