Join Indonesian artist Khairani Barokka at the Birmingham School of Art (B3 3BX) for a discussion and sharing workshop for Indonesian people. This event is part of the expanded programme of ‘Languages of Intimacy’, Grand Union’s current exhibition with Khairani, and artist Bella Milroy.
Within the exhibition, Khairani’s work explores Indonesian indigeneities, health practices and sick intimacies. ‘Kerokan Pol’, a series of four moving image works shot in Jakarta, considers the crowded spaces and communal cacophony of Indonesian social intimacies and relationships, juxtaposed in a surreal, playful manner with scenes of Western modernity and hypercapitalism.
‘Kerokan Pol’ is a playful way of saying ‘kerokan to the max’ in Indonesian. Kerokan is a traditional Indonesian form of healing from cold and flu symptoms in which a coin is used to rub cajuput oil in stripes into someone’s back – the redder the stripes, the more the treatment was needed. Along with the selling of Jamu and the picking of tumeric, Kerokan is one of the Indonesian practices shown in ‘Languages of Intimacy’.
The films represent some of the socioecological intimacies that Khairani considers the kindest and warmest from their country of birth, and shares them with the place that they have made a new home in. The sharing of these practices works as a rebuttal to the forced isolation and societal / medical neglect that disabled and ill people face.
The films are captioned in Indonesian and English, with occasional asides and strategic opacities therein.
This workshop presents an opportunity for Indonesian people to come together, reflect, and share their experiences living in the United Kingdom, as well as to engage with artworks that depict Indonesian culture-specific contexts. Khairani will lead a variety of discussion points and imagining exercises within the workshop.
If you would like to join us for this workshop, please email us at: info@grand-union.org.uk
About the artist
Khairani BarokkaOpen accordion
Khairani Barokka (b. 1985) is a writer, artist, arts consultant, translator and editor from Jakarta. Khairani’s writing and art centres disability justice as anticolonial praxis. This often involves subverting expectations of formats such as captions—which in her work often takes the form of poetry, essays, and hybrid work—and practices such as translation. By focussing on affective flows of violence in colonial capitalism past and present, Khairani consistently links environmental and indigenous justice to disability justice, and to historical colonial archives and visual cultures, in the work. In particular, Khairani centres forms of disability justice that are rooted in Global South lived experiences, including her own.
She regularly teaches, mentors, and consults for arts organisations, and has a PhD by Practice in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London. Among her honours, she has been a UNFPA Indonesian Young Leader Driving Social Change, a Delfina Foundation Associate Artist, an Artforum Must-See, and Associate Artist at the UK’s National Centre for Writing. In 2023, Okka was shortlisted for the Asian Women of Achievement Awards in the Arts and Culture Category. Her books include Indigenous Species (Tilted Axis), Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches, as co-editor), Rope (Nine Arches),Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches), shortlisted for the 2022 Barbellion Prize, and 2024’s amuk (Nine Arches), longlisted for the Jhalak Prize. Annah, Infinite (Tilted Axis, 2025) is her creative nonfiction debut, and is a Bookseller Expert Pick.
You can find out more about Khairani’s practice via her website here.
