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Tintin Wulia

Researcher

The Crafts and Fine Art Unit
Telephone
+46 31-786 68 53
+46 766-18 68 53
Mail
tintin.wulia@gu.se
Visiting address
Kristinelundsgatan 6-8
Göteborg
Postal address
Box 131
40530 Göteborg

About Tintin Wulia

Dr Tintin Wulia is a Senior Researcher at HDK-Valand/Academy of Art and Design and a Visiting Research Fellow at LSE Department of International History. She is Principal Investigator for Protocols of Killings: 1965, distance, and the ethics of future warfare (Swedish Research Council, 2021-2023), collaborator of PI William Walters for Rethinking Declassification: Dis/closure, Infrastructure, Aesthetics (SSHRC/CRSH, 2024-30), and Principal Investigator for Things for Politics’ Sake: Aesthetic Objects and Social Change (ERC, THINGSTIGATE, 101041284, 2023-2028).

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Wulia is an artist/researcher and research group leader with more than two decades of international track record.

Wulia's research stems out of conceptual and empirical engagement with the complexities of borders. She sees the world as an interconnected system – not a borderless world, but a world where entities interface with one another contiguously. Her works with video, sound, paintings, drawings, dance, text, installation, performance, public interventions, and quantitative methods mostly aim to tease out and activate these interconnections. Hence, they are often processual, interactive, and participatory. Wulia joined the University of Gothenburg in 2018, with a Postdoctoral Fellowship in design, crafts and society with a focus on migration, working interdepartmentally with HDK-Valand and the School of Global Studies, at the Centre on Global Migration (2018-2020).

She is a recipient of the highly competitive ERC Starting Grant 2021 for her project Things for Politics’ Sake: Aesthetic Objects and Social Change. A concept in this project is the subject of her retrospective solo show, curated by Naoko Sumi, Tintin Wulia: Things-in-Common at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, 21 Sep 2024 - 5 Jan 2025. The exhibition shows twenty-five works spanning over twenty-five years of her career, tracing the development of the concept. An associated learning gallery exhibited works by collaborators Rangga Purbaya and Dr Wulan Dirgantoro (1965 Setiap Hari), as well as the participatory work Butsu-Butsu Ko-kan, with Thingstigate team members Dr Kelly Ka-Lai Chan and Maxine Chionh, 21 Sep - 4 Nov 2024. These complementary exhibitions attracted more than 10,000 visitors across 87 days.

Wulia's works have been shown in major exhibitions including Chicago Architecture Biennale (2021), Sharjah Biennale (2013), Asia Pacific Triennale (2012), Gwangju Biennale (2012), Moscow Biennale (2011), Jakarta Biennale (2009), and Istanbul Biennale (2005), amongst others. They are also part of prominent private and public collections internationally, including in Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Singapore Art Museum, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, and He Xiangning Art Museum. Wulia represented Indonesia with a solo pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017).

Prior to receiving her PhD in art (RMIT University, 2014), Wulia's practice and research branched out of her trainings as a film composer (BMus, Berklee College of Music, 1997) and architecture engineer (BEng, Universitas Katolik Parahyangan, 1998). Her Australia Council for the Arts Fellowship (2014-2016) extended her engagements in diverse public spaces, and in a mobile ethnography of objects in urban settings. She was a Transcultural Art Network artist-in-residence (2015) at the UCL Slade School of Fine Art, London, UK, a Jackman Goldwasser Residency artist (2016) at Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, USA, and a Baik Residency artist (2019) at Davidson College, NC, USA, amongst other residencies. Her Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2018) at the Walter Reed Biosystematics Unit, NMNH(SI), Washington DC, USA, explores mosquitoes and migration, deaths during mosquitoes' larval and pupal emergence (which she calls liminal death), and wartime specimen collection.

Wulia is a co-founder and member of the transnational relay/research collective 1965 Setiap Hari; an initiator and member of the Make Your Own Passport network at the Centre on Global Migration, University of Gothenburg; member of the research group Power, Resistance and Social Change at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg; and a project interlocutor for an SNF-funded research project led by Prof Patricia Spyer, Images, (In)visibilities, and Work on Appearances at the Graduate Institute (IHEID). She co-founded minikino in 2002 and directed it until 2010. Wulia is also an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at UCL The Slade School of Fine Art (2022-3). Between 2015 and 2022 Wulia served on the editorial board of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) journal, GeoHumanities.

As an artist Wulia is represented by Baik Art, Jakarta, and Milani Gallery, Brisbane.

Research areas and interests

• everyday aesthetics and sociopolitics • aesthetic cosmopolitanism • critical geopolitics • human geography • resistance studies • materiality • socially engaged art • public art intervention • participatory performance • critical play • migration and the border • mobile ethnography • political ecology • peace and development studies • science and technology studies • Indonesian studies

• motifs: passports | mosquitoes | insects | maps | death | geometry | cardboard waste | machines

• themes: inclusive citizenship | mobility | chance | iconic consciousness | knowledge and the visuals | the anthropocene | identity | Indonesia's Chineseness | Indonesia's 1965 | violence, distance, and accountability | warfare | secrecy | archives and declassification | imagination and institution | imagination, memory, and the future

[Profile photo courtesy of David Ramsey and Van Every/Smith Galleries of Davidson College, NC, USA]