For the past fifteen years, I have had a poster hanging on the door of the room where I sleep, which shows a stylized representation of the Indonesian island of Bali. The shape of the island is composed of watercolor images of scenes from the paroxysm of violence that swept across the Indonesian archipelago during the years of 1965-1966 as part of a campaign of mass murder against the country’s left. The poster describes and illustrates in horrific detail elements of the progress of the violence, as well as its aftermath: an island where so many people had been killed and where so much land was left untenanted that the perpetrators were able to build an industrial tourism economy in the bleeding void that the genocide had left behind. I look at it every morning before I emerge to face the day. I use it to remind myself of how the world works and what my role as an artist is in confronting it.
The poster was designed by the Indonesian artist cooperative Taring Padi, a group of political artists and organizers based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, several of whose members I’ve been friends and colleagues with for nearly twenty years.
In early 2024, I realized that the 60th anniversary of the massacres was coming up, and I also realized that the anniversary would be taking place after the elections in the United States, which I had presumed would be won by Donald Trump. It seemed to me that looking more closely at the disaster of 1965 after 60 years had passed would provide a useful perspective on what was likely to unfold in the coming months and years. I wrote to my friends in Taring Padi to propose a collaborative project; addressing the past and future of the genocide in the form of an artist book in linocuts. They were interested, and in the first month of 2025 I traveled to Yogyakarta with a bag of carving tools and fifteen linoleum blocks, and during the course of the next two weeks we designed, drew and carved the blocks for that project.
What that looked like: I was staying at my friend Djuwadi’s house on the banks of one of the many small rivers that wind through the outskirts of Yogyakarta on their way to join the Progo River. Djuwadi is one of the founding members of Taring Padi, and grew up in a region of Java famous for its teak plantations and woodcarving traditions. His house, built on a scrap of riverside land that had been the neighborhood dump before he acquired it and began transforming it, is assembled from the deconstructed heartwood of several wooden houses from his home region of Blora, reconfigured into a substantial and beautiful structure ornamented by his own hand-carved panels of teakwood bas-relief. I would leave there to cycle the mile to the Taring Padi compound at about noon, buying a big bunch of rambutans from a street vendor on the way.
Tucked into a leafy back corner of Yogya’s Bantul suburb, Taring Padi’s community space and studio is a simple brick structure that follows the contour of a hill, rising from a small parking lot to an airy high-ceilinged workspace with a living room and kitchen. Titanic painted banners and prints drape the walls, full of figures from the revolution and slogans- “Democratic Society”, “Worker Power”. Next door to the Taring Padi house is the residence and studio of my friend Ucup Baik, another Taring Padi founder, a prolific printmaker and thinker whose thoughts about politics and society have long influenced my own.
As people trickled in, the discussions of structure and content began to unfold. I traced on a whiteboard the key notes to strike for the book. While I was broadly familiar with the timeline and the main characters of the disaster, many of the details were unfamiliar, and as the visual descriptions of the leadup to the violence took shape, I had to point to names, places, and incidents and ask who they were and what they represented.
Taring Padi means “Rice Fang”; it refers to the sharp spines that emerge from the rice grain as it ripens on the stalk. Initially formed in 1997, the young radical artists of the original cooperative had produced much of the most powerful visual culture associated with the 2008 uprising that led to the ouster of Indonesia’s long-term dictator, Suharto. The movement against the dictator was a motley affair, playing out in towns and cities across the archipelago as citizens finally decided that they had had enough of the corruption and venality of Suharto’s Western-backed regime and took to the streets and public squares of the country to demand his departure.
Taring Padi was there, utilizing the literal fabric of everyday life as a canvas on which to paint and print demands for a social transformation. As the protests spread, the artists approached street-side food sellers. They asked them if they could paint the tarps that advertised the dishes they had for sale- images of rebellion filled in the gaps between the colorful representations of chickens, fish, and eels. Taring Padi members would approach the ubiquitous cigarette kiosks and ask to see their stocks of free matchbooks, then patiently apply stickers bearing revolutionary messages to each matchbook and return them to the kiosk to distribute.
Their most powerful medium, however, was print. Taring Padi’s members had come together initially as students at Yogyakarta’s School of the Arts, and they shared a pursuit of printmaking as a political practice. Dynamic and radical designs excoriating regime corruption and memorializing the many victims of Suharto’s tyrannical rule were carved into blocks of Medium Density Fiberboard and printed onto cheap paper in communal parties that lasted for days. The blocks were set on the floor, inked up, paper laid on top of them and then the artists and their friends and comrades would take off their flip-flops and shuffle-dance across the blocks to impress the ink and image into the paper. These unlimited editions made their way onto the walls of cities throughout Indonesia, glued up on every surface flat enough to take a lick of paste. They brought the reality of rebellion into the daily life of everyday Indonesians, and helped to bring more and more of them out into the streets.
In the nearly three decades since 1998, Taring Padi has shifted and changed as an organization. Members come and go, but the mission remains- confronting the structures of domination in Indonesian society with visual media. Campaigns in solidarity with farmworkers, with people displaced by the consequences of fossil-fuel development, with indigenous peoples and with social movements have invited Taring Padi to join in their struggles, and the iconography and visual density of the group’s art continues to provide a foundation for diverse left organizing.
There is one subject that underlies much of Taring Padi’s work and structures the society in which they do it in complex ways—sometimes more or less invisible, at others so harshly immanent that it seems to cause all political horizons to converge. That subject is the genocide of 1965—the reason I made my way to Yogyakarta in the first place.
Taking PADI and Roger Peet planning the “6065” artist book. Image by Roger Peet.
In 1965 Indonesian politics were dominated by the tension between nationalism, communism, and political Islam. The country’s leader, Sukarno, was part of the non-aligned movement that sought to carve out a third path between the hegemonic hemispheres of the USa and the USSR, and his efforts to juggle the competing interests of powerful opposed forces were tenuously bearing fruit. The country’s communist party, the PKI, was at the time the third largest communist party in the world, after China and the USSR. Although it had broad popular support in the Archipelago, external forces saw it as an existential threat. Chief among those was the United States and its bloody intelligence services under the command of the Dulles brothers, John Foster and Alan, two right-wing ideologues whose campaign against communism had been laying waste to independent and left-wing political movements across the world before they turned their attention to Indonesia.
When an abortive and confusing coup attempt struck the upper echelons of Indonesia’s army in September of 1965, the military seized on it as a pretext to move against the communists. And they moved hard. A campaign of brutality, torture, rape and murder began to spread out across Java and in the subsequent months reached Bali and Sumatra, and pockets of violence appeared in many more of the thousands of islands that make up the nation, sweeping through the membership of the PKI and anyone associated with the party like fire in dry grass.
The military received extensive assistance from the Americans as it ramped up the campaign of killing, with the Dulles brothers providing lists of suspected communists and allies to elements of the Indonesian army, along with weapons, supplies, and logistical support. For America, all that really mattered was that a powerful force of independent communists be removed from any proximity to power: exactly how that happened wasn’t important. Mass murder was fine if it produced the desired results.
The army started its campaign as revenge for the six generals murdered in the September 3 coup, but their leader, Suharto, quickly came to see that the real prize of the moment was the prospect of completely rewriting Indonesian society’s sense of itself. He spurred the Army’s Special Forces onward to increasing heights of savagery, and as the rampage accelerated, they began to recruit assistance from the country’s criminal class. The murder spree intensified through the early months of 1966, breaking ideological containment to justify a whole host of revenge and opportunistic killings. Butchering a social or political enemy after labeling them a communist or massacring neighbors whose lands you coveted became common justifications for the social eradications unfolding throughout Indonesian society. Ethnic Chinese enclaves faced much of this kind of arbitrary criminality, with whole families and communities slaughtered and their assets seized. The savagery burned its way through the Indonesian populace, and at its conclusion, somewhere between 800,000 and 1.5 million people had been killed.
Suharto had his way- the genocide did fundamentally transform Indonesian society, but he wasn’t confident of the durability of that change. He developed a propaganda project to represent the genocide and its consequences to subsequent generations, enrolling filmmakers and writers to craft a series of films that would describe the murder campaign as historically and nationally necessary, and he decreed that these films and other materials would be shown in perpetuity to future generations of students, to ensure that the specter of communism would not rise to haunt the archipelago again. As we worked to elaborate the structure of our book and to incorporate these details, my friend Fitri described the experience of being required to watch those films in high school and, ironically, being so turned off by the compulsion that she began to question more and more of the standard narrative she was being fed.
The book’s structure was divided into four sections: the massacre, the aftermath, the expansion, and the future, each addressed in three detailed linoleum blocks that we took turns drawing up during long rainy afternoons. The massacre showed the mechanisms that Suharto’s military employed to ramp up the project of extermination, from the initial radio broadcasts announcing the response to the coup to the recruitment of paramilitaries and the development of industrial facilities for rape, murder, imprisonment, and the destruction of the cultural and intellectual presence of the PKI. In the distance the prison islands of the archipelago appear, and an enormous hand stamps “exile” onto a passport bearing an inversion of the national seal. The aftermath section shows how the regime established itself in the ashes of the disaster, developing the propaganda that would define the Indonesian national character going forward and enshrining the paramilitaries as pillars of national sovereignty and defense. The integration of the ideology of genocide into the legal system and the concretization of a new military hierarchy mirror each other, above grim representations of the breakdown in social cohesion and order and the flood of dispossessed refugees that accompanied the disaster.
I was reworking a small section of one of the panels that showed tiny figures dropping off a bridge when my friend Ucup stopped me to make sure I understood what was being represented. “This is an important part of the story, here, you have to get this right. These people falling into the river aren’t being pushed out of the truck, this truck on the bridge. They are jumping. They know the fate that they are about to face at the destination where the truck is taking them, and they are leaping, hands bound and blindfolded, into the river they can hear below.”
The expansion is the third section of the book and shows the logic of the genocide expanding out from Indonesia to infect politics all over the world. Vincent Bevins’ book The Jakarta Method details the way in which the US intelligence services incorporated the threat of what had happened to Indonesia into their campaigns against radical and progressive left-wing governments and movements in Guatemala, Brazil, and Chile. “The goal of Operaçao Jakarta was the physical elimination of communists. It called for mass murder, just as in Indonesia,” says Bevins, referring to the campaign’s manifestation in Brazil during the late 1960s.
The prospect of industrial-scale mass murder of leftists and other social undesirables was very appealing to the right-wing sectors of Latin American nations, and graffiti scrawls that proclaimed “Jakarta is Coming” were seen in several cities on the South American continent in the years following Indonesia’s crisis. More so than the simple genocide, however, was the prospect of military hegemony over society and culture, a project of full-spectrum dominance that inspired regimes like that of Augusto Pinochet as he strove to rewrite the logic of Chilean society to suit a neofascist program after his coup against the socialist Salvador Allende. As we drew the imagery for this section, showing the expansion of military economics and ideology across the landscape of the planet, we were talking about its contemporary manifestation in the genocide in Gaza.
The future was the last section to be finalized, the last to be drawn, and as I prepared to leave town, it was the only section that hadn’t been fully carved. Discussions about the themes and motifs to include had gone back and forth, and in those final days they cohered. One of the panels would feature the structures of a social order that would be able to resist calls for mass murder of its citizens, along with an imagining of the process of healing and truth-telling that would be necessary for a society to rid itself of the dark morass of memory. The second panel would focus on education, a process of documentation and truth-telling that would enable future generations to understand what had happened in the grim smoke of 1965. The final panel was set in a forest scene, with birds from all of Indonesia’s major island groups flying overhead and a group of figures dressed in the costumes of peoples from across the archipelago gathered around a table labeled “People’s Tribunal”, where a vision of some kind of justice would be uncovered, illuminated, and shared out equally among the gathered throng.
On one of the last nights I spent in Yogyakarta, I was sitting on the bamboo couch watching rainclouds light up at dusk, eating the fried tempeh snacklets that Indonesians call gorengan, and talking to Ucup and another artist, Bebe, about the experience that Taring Padi had the previous year during the international art festival Documenta. Held every five years in Kassel, Germany, Documenta is a festival of art that has endured for decades. The theme of the most recent incarnation of the festival was collective forms of art production from the Global South, and the main curators, another Indonesian art collective called Ruang Rupa, had invited Taring Padi to travel to Kassel in 2023 and create a monumental tapestry painting explaining their political perspective on the world. During the festival, a German art critic had seized on representations of Israeli military forces in the gigantic painting to accuse Taring Padi of antisemitism, and the ensuing uproar upended the festival and threatened to demolish the lives and careers of many of the artists, curators and participants, who suddenly found themselves facing a tide of wrath borne out of the unremediated ferment of German guilt.
“The controversy made a lot more people aware of our work on the international stage” said Bebek. “But it also meant that we became the focus of the festival to a degree that caused other groups to fade into the background. All of the international coverage focused on these accusations of antisemitism, with the result that all of the assembled collectives of amazing artists from Madagascar, the Philippines, and Palestine were totally sidelined, and their work became invisible. It was unfair, and unwarranted.”
Ucup ashed his cigarette into a bamboo ashtray and nodded.
“It was also an omen of things about to come” he said.
