Din Din
Din Din collects thoughts, works, and excerpted conversations with multidisciplinary practitioners whose practices span diverse fields and engage in developing strategies, scenarios, models, critical visualizations, and commentaries on the discourse of decolonization. This compilation originates from two interrelated events initiated during Riksa Afiaty’s 2019 residency at Jan van Eyck: the series of talks Padat Merayap (co-developed with Karoline Swiezynski) and the exhibition Mastertools. Together, they form a field of inquiry where discursive, curatorial, and artistic practices operate in distinct yet intersecting registers.
The Padat Merayap chapter (English: Congestion), named after the talk series, gathers selected transcriptions alongside additional texts that extend and intensify the conversations. It operates primarily as a discursive space, where decoloniality is approached as an analytical stance grounded in speculative and imaginative thinking. The discussions interrogate how decolonial questions are framed within and against (colonial) institutions, their structures of power, and their knowledge infrastructures—archives, collections, and institutional frameworks. They further examine the circulation of concepts and theories, their entanglement with arts and culture, and the role of intellectuals, academics, artists, and curators in articulating these concerns, while keeping open the unresolved question of what, why, and how decolonization might mean.
Meanwhile, the Mastertools chapter shifted the focus toward material, spatial, and object-based investigations through documentation of exhibited works. Here, historical systems of classification and display are traced from early scientific, missionary, and botanical expeditions to contemporary institutional archives, revealing how such apparatuses organize knowledge and construct fixed representations of ‘the other’. While once framed as instruments of understanding and progress, these devices are reconsidered through (de)colonial histories and contemporary transformations, exposing their embedded power structures and shifting functions. The artists in the exhibition retool and re-appropriate these instruments through objects, installations, and displays that foreground the complexity of the contexts from which they emerge. Across both chapters, decoloniality functions as a critical position for navigating institutions, archives, and lived experience, while also reframing “din din”—the repeated sound of car horns amid Jakarta’s traffic congestion—as a material and conceptual condition ofmodern life that shapes how knowledge, histories, and futures are produced and contested.
Book team
CONTRIBUTORS
Catarina Simão, Claudia Martinez Garay, Ferdiansyah Thajib, Harm Stevens, Ilya Fedorov, Gökcan Demirkazik, Karoline Świeżyński, Köken Ergun, Marjolein van Pagee, Michelle Wong, Oesman Effendi, Patrick D. Flores, Post Museum, Riksa Afiaty, Roy Villevoye, They Are Here
INITIATOR
Riksa Afiaty
EDITORS & TRANSCRIBER
Akmalia Rizqita "Chita", Grace Samboh, Rachel K. Surijata, Ratna Mufida
PROOFREADER
COVER AND LAYOUT DESIGNER
Maria Uthe
Published by Perkumpulan Tanda Hubung Indonesia (Hyphen—)
in conjunction with
Figures, dedications, and civilisations
- Singapore Art Museum (as part of Singapore Biennale 2025: pure intention)
October 31, 2025–March 29, 2026
- RUBANAH Underground Hub
October 25 –December 17, 2025
- RUCI Art Space
October 25 –December 17, 2025
- Griya Seni Hj. Kustiyah Edhi Sunarso
September 22, 2025–April 22, 2026