Galeri Kedai Kebun Forum, Yogyakarta
9–19 October 2026
The first sound that registers after stepping into the gallery is a radio broadcast. In front of the sofa, a radio recording plays on a loop, hissing, its frequency almost lo-fi, typical of broadcasts from that era. Over this sound, the chatter of visitors piles up.
Raised braille is printed on white paper, lined up along the wall. To understand what is written there, we can look at the translation printed behind the braille sheet. But out of curiosity, we cannot resist touching the surface of the braille, and the woodcut on top of it, trying to trace their shapes with our fingertips. We are not the only ones. The people touching the braille and the woodcut, as far as we can tell, are those who can see.
In the middle of the room, four chairs surround a table. People sit there without hurry, opening the two binders of transcripts left on it. They chat with the gallery attendant, with the people who made the exhibition, or with one another.
The broadcast that played in the exhibition Peristiwa yang Bermakna was called Dialog Seni Kita, or DSK. From 1999 to 2005, it went out on 104.5 FM every Friday at 9.15 pm, for about 45 minutes. The programme was a collaboration between Yayasan Seni Cemeti and Radio UNISI FM. By the end of its run there were 362 episodes of interactive dialogue.
DSK began only a few months after the fall of the New Order,1 when the standing of the arts was being weighed anew. Over six years, the subjects ranged from activism, education, tradition, new media, collectivism, media and women to arts management.
Who first came up with the idea is no longer remembered for certain, not even by Professor Masduki, who hosted DSK on UNISI FM from 1999 to 2005. More than twenty years have passed since the last broadcast. Today he is one of the initiators of Museum Pers Jogja, which runs the project to digitise those recordings.
Although memories of how it began have blurred, most of the programme’s recordings have been kept safe. For decades, the cassettes of 362 episodes, along with documentary photographs, transcripts, videotapes and minutes, were kept at the Indonesian Visual Art Archive (IVAA), barely touched. A small portion of the cassettes was lost, and another portion was damaged.
The exhibition did not begin with a wish to exhibit the archive. What came first was a plan to digitise it. Museum Pers Jogja hopes to carry out one press-related digitisation project each year. The first year’s was the newspaper Kedaulatan Rakyat, from 1946 to 2012. For the second year, the choice fell on radio.
UNISI turned out to no longer hold the cassettes, so the Museum Pers Jogja team went to IVAA, which was then temporarily closed to evaluate and reorganise its programmes. They were welcomed in all the same, and found the cassettes complete, together with documentary photographs, transcripts and videotapes. Research funding from a university then paid for a small team that waited for IVAA to reopen. After that the equipment was installed, the team set about finding the index, and 50 cassettes were digitised. “Along the way, the money ran out,” Anang says. “Just enough to digitise 50 and write a synopsis for each broadcast.”
The next fifty came from an open call by Dinas Kebudayaan DIY2 to facilitate visual arts exhibitions. Anang Saptoto, an artist and one of the exhibition’s curators, ran it with a team, and invited Singgih Purnomo, a consultant on disability inclusion. From that point the proposal grew. “The proposal we submitted was not only to exhibit DSK,” Anang says, “but how this archive and digitised material could be exhibited inclusively.”
To choose was to cut down. From 362 episodes, the list shrank to 200, then 100, then 50, following the budget. Anang chose from IVAA’s table, which grouped the broadcasts by visual art, performance, film, design and literature rather than by date. Of the 100 episodes already digitised, 35 were chosen for exhibition. Raihan Robby, IVAA’s programme coordinator and also one of the curators, arranged them by period, from 1999 to 2005, so that the issues emerging from year to year could be read. According to Robby, the conversation about art and culture from 1999 onwards “went through a turning point in which everyone needed to rethink what art should do in this new era.”
The broadcast no longer comes from a radio. In front of the sofa, a television plays the digital archive from IVAA’s YouTube channel, moving on to another episode each time one ends. The screen shows only the poster for the archive programme, without captions. On the ceiling, criss-crossing banners show documentary photographs from the broadcast sessions of the time. What used to be only sound has become a room.
According to the exhibition text, every decision about the layout was made by imagining the barriers people with disabilities might face. The room was made deliberately spacious so that wheelchair users could move freely. The archive photographs, which depend most on sight, were not a priority and were therefore placed above.
The woodcut on the wall has a story of its own. It was first imagined small, like a stamp for a postcard that visitors could take home, and at the same time something blind visitors could feel with their hands to imagine what photographs of that time looked like. Small sizes turned out to be hard to recognise by touch, so the woodcut was made larger. The curatorial team itself admits that not every blind visitor has visual memories of photographs, so the woodcut was offered more as an experience.
At this point the exhibition tests its own assumptions. At first, the curatorial team planned to turn all the readable text into braille. They took the plan to Irwan Dwi Kustanto, one of the exhibition’s blind consultants, while the works were being installed. His answer was simple: not all of it was necessary. Titles were enough, and blind visitors who were interested could ask for more. The curatorial team saw it as a lesson learned. “Sometimes we assume that to facilitate means to provide everything,” Robby says.
The road to that decision was fairly long. According to the exhibition text, people with disabilities were involved from the planning stage. The curatorial team discussed disability, accessibility and the ethics of interaction with them, then checked the design in the exhibition space itself together with people with physical disabilities and blind people.
Who actually came is another matter. The curatorial team admits that visitors without disabilities outnumbered visitors with disabilities. If the target was visitors with disabilities, the result is not yet as good as it could be. According to them, however, the aim was precisely an exhibition with an inclusive concept, and bridging the two still needs more effort. At the opening and on the last day, no visitor who could be recognised as having a disability was visible, though disability is not always visible. From the workshop the team held came other news: autistic participants and their companions, and teachers from special schools (SLB),3 including one who rarely goes to art exhibitions, found the exhibition interesting.
One question remains open. This archive is mostly sound. The exhibition text says the design was discussed with people with physical disabilities and blind people, and does not mention Deaf people. In the room, the television plays the archive without captions, and on the table are two binders of transcripts. Whether that is enough for Deaf visitors cannot yet be confirmed.
The exhibition text describes DSK as an archive of conversations that will remain relevant to this day. Robby, one of the curators, explains it through collectivism, one of the threads that, in his view, connects past and present.
Back then, he says, collectivism was discussed in two patterns: “grouping by ideology and grouping by locality”, the first like Taring Padi, the second, which could be based on region or campus, like Kelompok Jendela. Now collectivism has “become more fluid”, with “various forms that drive it”.
Those two patterns can indeed be heard in the DSK archive. In the episode “Berkarya dalam Kelompok” on 25 April 2002, Kuss Indarto, a guest speaker, distinguishes between them. Kelompok Jendela, he explains, came together because of the social bonds among its members, fellow Minangkabau who had all left home for Java. “Taring Padi was built through ideological cohesion, I think.” He calls the difference worth discussing, and the conversation then moves on to whether forming groups is a way to survive in a tight market or merely a container for exclusivity.
In this archive, the two patterns Robby reads already have names and examples.
Of the 362 DSK episodes, 100 have been digitised. According to the curatorial team, the biggest remaining task is improving the audio quality. After the exhibition, all the episodes already converted to digital form will be uploaded to IVAA’s YouTube channel, while the rest will be digitised gradually. On the exhibition’s last day, 30 episodes could be heard there.
The curatorial team of Peristiwa yang Bermakna wants to follow this exhibition with a catalogue that is also printed in braille, and a kind of manual for making exhibitions with an inclusive logic.
Back then, to hear DSK, people switched on the radio on a Friday night. Today some of its broadcasts can be accessed on IVAA’s YouTube channel anytime.
Notes
- The New Order (Orde Baru) was the authoritarian regime of President Suharto, who ruled Indonesia from March 1966 until his resignation in May 1998. ↩︎
- The Culture Office of the Special Region of Yogyakarta (Daerah Istimewa Yogyakarta, DIY). ↩︎
- SLB stands for Sekolah Luar Biasa, Indonesia’s special schools for children with disabilities. ↩︎