Edinburgh Napier University

  This paper will discuss three body of works by the Indonesian photographer Abednego Trianto: Sugar Lords in Java (2012), 1883 (2014), and What Am I Going to Be When I Grow Up? Raden Ayu of Course (2015). Exhibited in the Noorderlicht festival (the Netherlands), Singapore Art Museum, DECK (Singapore) and Chobi Mela festival (Bangladesh), Trianto’s works consistently contest and reconfigure the use and truth-value of the colonial photographic archive. The nature of the camera as an archiving machine (Enwezor, 2012) postulates the embodiment of archival ambitions and procedures (Sekula, 2003) in photographic practice and its artistic endeavours. Archival attributes and methods in photography generate diverse artistic forms, from Andy Warhol’s Pop art, to Lorna Simpson’s code of racialised images; from John Heartfiled’s photomontage, to Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typology. Meanwhile, the (archival) discourse of colonial photographic material has taken a different route. The culture of imagi(ni)ng the colonies has gained scholarly attention since 1980s but the debate around colonial photography has primarily taken place outside the art historical frame of reference. Anthropology, geography, history and museology have been the primary framework in which we encounter photographs produced within the colonial context. It is only fairly recently that photo historians, curators, and photographers have begun to contest the premises of colonial photography revisiting narratives, iconographies and cultural stereotypes classed as colonial, but also genres, such as vernacular photography that were not specifically included in previous readings of the colonial archive. In this light, this paper will first, survey works of Southeast Asian photographers that deal with the legacy of photography practices in the colonial era. Secondly, it will conduct a close reading of Abednego Trianto’s works that, in capitalising on the fluidity and versatility of digitalised archive, might propose an expanded postcolonial archive that moves from “archiving the colonial past to imagi(ni)ng a postcolonial future” (Supartono & Moschovi, 2016).