Semsar Siahaan was a seminal figure in the development of Indonesian contemporary art during the 1980s. In a prolific practice that ranged almost four decades, he not only unpacked the despotic nature of the New Order Regime (1966-1998) but also systematically broke down the established aesthetics of post-1965 art, which in his view had become subservient to art history’s pictorially sublime image. In 2003, Semsar Siahaan held a farewell exhibition in Victoria, Canada. A city where he had sought refuge in 1999 after being identified as an agitator against Suharto’s New Order regime. The exhibition’s highlight was G8 Pizza and the Study of the Falling Man, a work comprised of eight sections, laid out like slices of a pie. The work depicts creatures seated around a negotiation table trading and staging nightmares and scandals. Each segment features a different character, composites of gamblers, wrestlers, surgeons and demons - creatures that the artist refers to as MANUBILIS.The tension represented by the creatures is revealed further by the carcass of animals hanging upside down in a X-like form behind the seated figures, revealing yet another theme that had preoccupied the artist since the early 1990s – the slaughterhouse. On the furthest edges are anonymous crowds – as observers, witnesses, ghosts and revolutionaries. The ambitious scale and energy of the work remains consistent with Siahaan’s ongoing concerns with the nature of art making and poetics of revolt.
