Those who 'also paint': Taring Padi Against the Division of Artistic Labour

Why Taring Padi? The contemporary relevance of Taring Padi is surprising, especially because it is rooted in the doctrine of socialist realism, which, aside from occasional rediscoveries, is commonly associated with a flattening of realism into the needs of regime propaganda. Taring Padi’s art disproves this commonplace. While it is true that the collective’s historical roots can be traced back to the socialist realism of LEKRA (Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat, or the Institute of People’s Culture) – the cultural movement that forged its own, distinctly Indonesian, version of the aesthetic doctrine imported from Russia – it is equally true that those roots were not planted in a socialist system, still less in what Boris Groys has called the Gesamtkunstwerk of the Soviet state under Stalin.1 Rather, they grew out of anticolonial struggle and of the clandestinity that followed the genocide of communists carried out between 1965–66 by the Suharto regime. Moreover, LEKRA was decisively influenced by the Mexican muralists, who, as Adrian Vickers suggests, represented ‘an example of revolutionary art that was not tied to conservative styles of realism’.2 Herein lies the critical difference: Taring Padi’s is a social (not socialist) realism that developed not as state-sanctioned art but against the state and, before that, against colonial rule and Mooi Indië (the Beautiful Indies), the painterly style that, well into the twentieth century, reproduced an exoticising image of Indonesia in keeping with the Dutch colonial gaze. Taring Padi’s roots are thus to be traced within this realist and decolonial genealogy. 

Moreover, the mode of representation that historically matured within this Indonesian genealogy is not, as in Soviet or Chinese socialist realism, aspirational in character. The fact that this alternative realist tradition did not develop under actually existing socialisms, meant that it could not afford the vice of depicting reality as it ought to have been. Rather, it offered – and continues to offer – a dialectical vision of reality. The same holds for Taring Padi, with one important qualification: their dialectical vision implies no historical determinism, no ‘secularised eschatology’, but rather points to the centrality of class struggle as a historical necessity against colonialism, neocolonialism, capitalism, Fascism, militarism, extractivism, sexism and so on.3 

The world depicted by Taring Padi in its large banners is indeed a world rendered with didactic intent, but it is not a world of monumental forms; rather, it is a multitudinous universe. In authoritarian iconography, the masses are masses precisely because they become one, a faceless mob, within the Leviathan of constituted power, within the body of the sovereign. Taring Padi’s multitudes are never subject to this reduction; yet neither are they portrayed, as in neoliberal ideology, as aggregates of isolated individuals competing against each other. Instead, they gather around certain symbols (often organic) of unity, often placed at the centre of the pictorial compositions, which become ‘backbones’, as Taring Padi call them, of the work. Examples here include the olive tree (the botanical symbol of Palestinian sumud) in عدالة الشعب (Peoples’ Justice series no. 7, 2024), or the Samauma (the mother of all trees of the Amazon) in Retomar Nossa Terra (Rebut Tanah Kita/Fight for Our Land, People’s Justice series no. 2, 2023). Unity here does not entail a renunciation of singularity. In the banner People's Liberation (Peoples’ Justice series no. 9, 2026), it takes the geological form of a volcano: the mountain’s rocks are rendered as faces – each with its own recognisable physiognomy – evoking the interconnection different struggles across the global South and North. This iconography draws its inspiration from the famous image put forward by the anticolonial leader Amilcar Cabral, who, asked by an interviewer how guerrilla warfare could possibly be organised in the flat terrain of Guinea-Bissau, without the aid of mountains, replied: ‘Our people are our mountains’.4 

The works of Taring Padi and the people they depict are at once situated and syncretic. Situated, because the banners do not merely represent struggles but are intended to both intervene in and contribute to them – indeed, they are often designed as props to be used in marches, demonstrations, or assemblies. Moreover, their internationalist banners emerge out of dialogue with other activists – be they a community of Javanese peasants, a collective of European art workers, or a group of Brazilian Sem Terra. At the same time, the strength of their work lies not in simply transcribing these conversations on canvas, but in translating them into a multitudinous register. In the paintings, the people teem, sacrifice themselves, die, fight, till the land, dance, sing, work, and organise, blowing apart the ideological rigidities that often inhabit the progressive camp: from nationalism to identitarian thinking. It is an imagined people, in which figures from the revolutionary pantheon mingle with anonymous faces, where diverse struggles and social identities intertwine and become articulated together. It is not the people as they are, nor the people as they ought to be; it is the people caught within the thousand possible processes of their becoming revolutionary. The people here are not the pure and homogenous national citizens of Western populism. While they are certainly a child of the anticolonial-nationalist era, above all they represent the violently suppressed dream of universal (a forbidden word) unity and solidarity among all subaltern subjectivities. This is the powerful, anticipatory, radically naïve (in the sense of anti-cynical) horizon of the people who populate the collective’s banners.

Taring Padi presents an alternative politics to the processes of fascisation currently under way, both in the world at large and within the neoliberal art circuit. No less interesting, is the fact that the Indonesian collective’s images and practice offer an alternative to the individualism and identity politics that have dominated that same circuit over the past few decades. Their work stitches together a collective politics of resistance grounded in multiple lines of oppression (class, race, gender, sexuality, etc.) that intersect within the social individual. This contrasts markedly with the neoliberal art circuit, which in recent decades has seen a widespread aestheticisation of intersectionality and produced a poetics of individualism organised around a hierarchy of oppressions – described in increasingly exclusive terms – that has closed off the horizon of possibility of collective struggle.

For Taring Padi, by contrast, the intersectional dimensions of different struggles is not given in advance; it has to be built intentionally and collectively. This is why their art, so programmatically didactic, is in fact a breath of fresh air, a break from the poetic mannerisms much contemporary art that has cast intersectionality as an individualising paradigm – one compatible with the Romantic conception of the artist as the culminating figure of individualism, and therefore easily commodified by the art market. 

This is not only a matter of iconography, of what is depicted; it also concerns Taring Padi’s creative practice, which relegates authorship – individual as much as collective – to the background, favouring instead the use of painting as militant research, as a means for building internationalist solidarity. 

One could be tempted to give in to the connoisseur’s desire and learn to distinguish, within this work, the hand of the different individuals who make up the group, and each one’s contribution to the collective image; but that would be to miss the point.

Many hands take part in producing a banner. Indeed, some banners – as in the case of the internationalist cycle People's Justice (2023–26) – were begun on one continent and finished on another; some were produced by certain members of the collective, others by other members; some bear the mark of hands external to Taring Padi. All of them have a participatory conceptual genesis that entails, in stages and through processes that can last for months, the building of a dialogue among different people, groups, and collectives. Let us take, by way of example, the case of the banner People's Liberation (2026). It began with an online discussion between Taring Padi and a group of European and Palestinian art workers that went on for months; this dialogue then continued in person, in a three-day assembly in a remote village in Portugal, and culminated in ten intense days of preliminary work in Yogyakarta, at the artists’ studio. There, the aforementioned collective and Taring Padi worked together on the first stages of the banner, which was then completed on site over the course of a month. At its different stages, different people moved in and out of this production process. Finally, the banner was exhibited in Venice (transported in a suitcase by one of Taring Padi’s members), in Sale Docks (an activist art space), during the days of the historic Biennale strike against the presence of the Israeli pavilion.

The temporality of this process, too, does not unfold according to the art world’s agenda but responds, rather, to the urgencies of the political present: the deadline is not the exhibition, but the strike; the point of reference is not the market, but the social dimension; the commissioner is not a gallery or a biennale, but a social movement. 

In this way, Taring Padi gives rise to a recognisable sign, yet one that is never identical to itself. The people that Taring Padi depict will never be reduced to one, because too many hands, minds, and sensibilities pour into every banner. Certainly, the intent is didactic, even propagandistic – the political stance is clear – but the shared production process is a structural impediment to the production of hierarchical systems of propaganda. It is this mix of immediacy and complexity that makes Taring Padi’s paintings particularly compelling. At first glance, it seems as if their message can be grasped instantly; and yet, on closer inspection, each work is inhabited by hidden details, a myriad of lines of flight, and small incongruities; contradictory political grammars coexist within them, a teeming host of possibilities for interpretation and rebellion. 

Taring Padi is, ultimately, a machine that subverts the division of artistic labour. Their practice opens up a way working that not only transcends the individual author but the tendency towards forms of artistic specialisation. The movement is, instead, towards an art of the common, in the sense of a multitude that thinks and paints not in unison but together. It is an autonomous practice of artistic cooperation set against the expropriation of creative power carried out by the culture industries; it is a prefigurative model for a society freed from capitalism’s divisions of labour, a society in which, as Marx famously put it: ‘there are no painters, but at most men who, among other things, also paint’.5