PM's award takes artist to Indonesia

PhD candidate and artist Elly Kent left for Indonesia last month on a prestigious Prime Minister’s Award. Elly will spend a year at the Bandung Institute of Technology speaking to artists and local experts, investigating participatory art practices in Indonesia.

The Prime Minister’s Australia Asia Outgoing Postgraduate Scholarship, which Elly has been awarded, goes to twenty students each year and supports research in Asia as part of a postgraduate qualification.

Elly’s personal history with Indonesia spans most of her lifetime. She first lived in Indonesia as an 8 year old when her father was posted to the remote town of Kefamenanu in West Timor working for AusAID. Here, she started learning Indonesian, experienced the culture first-hand and even met ANU anthropologists passing through. “After living there while I was young, I knew from then on my goal was to get back to Indonesia as often as I could,” she says.

“Contemporary Indonesian art became the natural extension of this when I went to Art School.”

Since this early introduction, Elly has been back and forth between Indonesia and Australia countless times. She spent a year in Yogyakarta in 2001 as part of her combined Bachelor of Asian Studies and Visual Arts degree.

This time, Elly is taking her family with her – husband Shane and their three children, Adi, 7 and twin girls Eden and Finn, 5. She says the biggest challenge of the trip is choosing the right school for her children. She hopes to send her children to a local Indonesian school in Bandung, so they can experience Indonesian language and culture first hand.

Participatory art is about using art as a context for social engagement and investigates how people interact in the process of creating art, and how they react and engage to complete works of art. Elly has so far found that existing theories on the subject, which have their roots in European and American experience, don’t explain participatory art practices in Indonesia.

Having spent the last two years working on the background to her research and artwork component of her doctorate in visual arts, Elly is looking forward to working with artists and art theory experts and gathering first-hand data in Bandung. She hopes to go on to complete an internship as an optional second year to her scholarship.