Letter No.2 - Terlihat Terasa

There is a wall of faces in our exhibition that I keep coming back to.

One hundred and fifty of them. All different. All painted by Rajata Hakim who is, depending on the day, either a very deep person or someone who makes things sound very deep. With Rajata it is genuinely hard to tell and that’s a positive trait. He would probably say something more poetic than that but this is my letter so.

Rajata is Tulisan's Artist in Residence. Has been since 2023. His work lives somewhere between painting and poetry and the specific feeling you get when something beautiful is about to disappear. His AIR collection is called Sapovnela. It's a Georgian word. It means the flower that nobody can find. Make of that what you will. I think it's beautiful. I also think he knew exactly what he was doing when he picked it.

For the 1830 exhibition he made portraits. A hundred and fifty of them. Random people, pretty faces, rendered in his style that somehow manages to be both loose and precise at the same time. I stood in front of them for a while before he came and found me.

I told him they were pretty. He gave me a look.

Then he explained what they actually are. He paints people as they appear before him. Then he asks them to describe themselves. Beyond his gaze. Their voices are kept separate from their portraits. Because no image, he said, can claim to contain the whole person.

I nodded slowly the way you do when someone says something that is either very obvious or very profound and you cannot immediately tell which.

Within the context of 1830 it becomes something else entirely. A question of power. Who was allowed to describe us. Who was left out of the story. Because the colonial archive is full of portraits too. Javanese faces painted by Dutch eyes. Described by hands that had already decided what they were looking at before they picked up the brush.

Rajata holds open the space for what remains unseen. What remains unheard.

He said the deepest wound is not that our stories disappear. It is that we begin to believe they were never ours to tell.

I stood there for a moment after he said that.

Then I told him again that the portraits were really pretty.

He laughed.

Reserve your portrait and deep question talk by Rajata Hakim
every Friday, 11:00 AM - 03:00 PM
at Tulisan Darmawangsa Square

The game continues,
Oki - Tulisan