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Tintin Wulia

Researcher

The Crafts and Fine Art
Unit
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. She is Principal Investigator of Protocols of Killings: 1965, distance, and the ethics of future warfare (Swedish Research Council-funded, 2021-2023). For her project Things for Politics’ Sake: Aesthetic Objects and Social Change she received the highly competitive ERC Starting Grant (ERC, THINGSTIGATE, 101041284, 2023-2028).

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As a transnationally practicing artist/researcher, Wulia has been examining the complexities of borders for more than two decades. She sees the world as an interconnected system – not a borderless world, but a world where entities interface with one another contiguously. Her works through video, sound, paintings, drawings, dance, texts, installation, performance, and public interventions 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).

Her 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 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 urban materiality. 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, liminal death (deaths during mosquitoes' larval and pupal emergence), and wartime specimen collection.

Wulia is a member of the editorial board of the AAG journal GeoHumanities; initiator and member of the Make Your Own Passport network at the Centre on Global Migration, University of Gothenburg; co-founder of 1965 Setiap Hari; member of the research group Power, Resistance and Social Change at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg; Resident Adjunct at the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research; Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the UCL Slade School of Fine Art; Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Literature and Languages, University of Surrey; and an interlocutor for an SNF-funded research project led by Patricia Spyer, Images, (In)visibilities, and Work on Appearances at the Graduate Institute (IHEID).

Research areas and interests

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

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

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

[Profile photo courtesy of Davidson College Art Galleries, NC, USA