Searching for the feminine: Motherhood and Maternal Subjectivity in Indonesian Visual Arts

• In Event: Recovering Female Subjectivities: Writing History and the Politics of Gender in Southeast Asian Art

Abstract

During the formative years of Indonesian modern art history, motherhood was considered to be a purely sentimental subject matter, i.e. a glorification of the feminine and strongly embedded in the masculine nationalist discourse. The paper shall discuss how the art works by contemporary women artists such as Titarubi and Laksmi Shitaresmi challenge these stereotypes by depicting a more nuanced representation of motherhood and maternal subjectivity. The paper will also discuss the distinction between motherhood as the lived-in experience of daily chores and pleasures for women as mothers, and maternal subjectivity as a site of the psychic dimension of emotion and feeling. Furthermore, the paper shall examine the works of these artists as a potential for a feminist reading within Indonesian art history by looking at how of the experience of motherhood as central to, and inseparable from, their life as artists.

Author

• Wulan Dirgantoro, LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore