Color Curtain
The color curtain and the promise of Bandung
This conference and exhibition take their title and point of departure from Richard Wright’s The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (1956), a critical reflection on the symbolic impact of the 1955 Asian–African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, from April 18 to 24, 1955. Bandung marked a historical moment in which existing affinities and solidarities found a shared name—Afro-Asian—and entered cultural and political discourse. In essence, the Afro-Asian solidarity movement, catalyzed by Bandung, emerged as an anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, and anti-racist movement.
Drawing connections between the Bandung Conference and the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement in the United States, Richard Wright championed the African American cause and called for solidarity with the struggles of “colored peoples” against capitalist, Western, and white exploitation. Central to this objective was cultural cooperation between Asia and Africa and their diasporas, as Angadipuram Appadorai, Secretary-General of the Indian Council of World Affairs, wrote in his influential text on the Bandung Conference. Notably, the conference established a cultural committee alongside its political and economic committees. Yet it has remained less clear how the political values celebrated during the Bandung era informed the aesthetics of artists and cultural workers.
We provisionally describe the “third-way” artistic and literary imagination as comprising several key principles, including political and cultural self-determination, the revalorization of local cultural forms, and a dynamic engagement with both local and international commitments. Within their internationalist vision, these cultural expressions embody a poetics of analogy: an inward focus on building local cultural traditions while simultaneously drawing translational parallels with similar experiences across distant geographies.
Taking Wright’s report as a point of departure, this project seeks to re-examine the so-called “promise” of Bandung and the ways in which it was culturally articulated—through its hopes, disillusions, and contestations—its resonance with the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, and its continuing contemporary significance.
We conceive of culture and art as part of a system of action intended to effect change in the world. This action-centered approach emphasizes the practical, mediatory role of art within social processes, in which cultural and artistic practices mediate social agency among people, objects, and activities. This perspective informs the “storylines” developed by researchers for the conference and exhibition, with the 1955 Asia–Africa Conference in Bandung serving as a catalytic point of reference.
The conference
In preparation of an exhibition, the conference took place in [...] and hosted by the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and Städelschule Frankfurt. In collaboration with Hyphen from Yogyakarta, Indonesia; BlaXtarlines Kumasi and National Museum Accra, Ghana; Singapore National Gallery; Ateneo Gallery at the Ateneo University Manila, Philippines. Supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Städelschule Frankfurt.
Grace Samboh and Arham Rahman delivered a presentation in Bahasa Indonesia about Karangan: Lampiran tentang pengelolaan, keramah-tamahan, dan lain-lain or Appendices on organization, hospitality, and other things—for this conference with the support from Rachel K. Surijata as a translator.
Through a selection of images, this presentation tried to unpack the creation of what is now tagged as "the Bandung spirit" through one particular aspect of the conference’s organizational side. The National Archive of Indonesia (ANRI) logged at least 565 photographic archives from the preparation up to the event. Oftentimes, these images are treated, read, and analyzed as evidence, visual, therefore factual proofs. Have we ever considered that the Asia Africa Conference (1955) might be consciously constructed to be a myth?
The exhibition
The exhibition took place at the The University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive from the end of October until the beginning of November 2023.