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.
