Multiversality of Care in Indonesian Visual Art and Contemporary Practice
Convener: Kiki Rizky Soetisna Putri
Co-convener: Christine Gerriete Henriette Toelle
We live in a moment of recurring fractures, where alliances dissolve and reassemble, and solidarities reemerge in altered forms. Multipolarization increasingly structures everyday life. From the Global South, these shifts unfold through infrastructural and institutional asymmetries, demanding renewed collective aspirations. In this context, we approach care directionality—an orientation through which bodies and institutions turn toward or away from one another (Ahmed 2006).
Responding to the symposium’s call for anthropological pluriversality, this panel proposes care as situated knowledge and relational practice. We ask how care operates across fractured worlds? What forms of accountability emerge when love becomes action? Drawing on Bell Hooks’ All About Love: New Visions (1999), we also revisit her questions: How do we actively love another being? How do we love the planet? What does love look like when translated into practice? Emerging from a dialogue between contemporary art history and social anthropology, this panel departs from disciplinary difference as a productive multipolarity. Rather than seeking metaphysical plurality, we trace the emergence of multiple ontologies through concrete practices of care in art, research, and everyday life. If pluriversality names the coexistence of moral and ecological worlds, we introduce multiversality to emphasize care as rhizomatic practice (Deleuze and Guattari 1980): non-hierarchical, non-linear, and resistant to singular ethical horizons.
Care here becomes a field of relational intensities. Cultural residues are neither romantic survivals nor pure oppositions to modernity, but co-producing sites of intersecting temporalities and authorities. Borrowing from Anna Tsing’s (2015) attention to life beyond stable nature/culture binaries, we understand care as relational and precarious—shaped by friction rather than coherence. And last, following Benedict Anderson’s (1983) insight that communities are imagined into being, we ask how care might participate in imagining pluriversal futures. How might love, understood as relational accountability, inform future-making in a multipolar world?
Those questions are then grounded in Indonesian contemporary art and visual culture, in which we invite together young scholars and artists whose practices explore diverse forms of care—spiritual, ecological, archival, and communal. Through these situated engagements, we examine how care mediates aspiration, memory, and political imagination within and beyond the Global South.