Archiving the Bandung School: Pedagogy, Politics, and Postcolonial Knowledge-Making

Established in 1947, the Bandung Institute of Technology’s (ITB) Faculty of Art and Design played a pivotal role in shaping modern art education in Indonesia. Emerging in the aftermath of the Japanese occupation (1942-1945) and shortly after the proclamation of Indonesian independence on 17 August 1945, the foundation of the institution reflected a broad national desire to formalise higher education and cultural development in the newly sovereign republic. However, due to continued involvement of Dutch educators and the institutional inheritance of European art academies, Bandung’s pedagogical orientation remained deeply rooted in Western formalism. This close association led to longstanding critiques, particularly the 1954 claim by Trisno Sumardjo that Bandung functioned as a "Western laboratory” (Laboratorium Barat), which, in Sumardjo’s critique, was a space where imported modernist styles were replicated without sufficient grounding in Indonesian sociocultural realities.

Kiki Rizky Soetisna Putri is a researcher and lecturer based in Bandung, Indonesia. She currently teaches at the Faculty of Art and Design, Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), and is the co-founder of the Center for Indonesian Visual Art Studies (CIVAS ITB), a center dedicated to preserving and studying archives related to the history of the Bandung School—an intellectual and artistic movement rooted in the Faculty of Art and Design, ITB.
Kiki holds a PhD from the Graduate School of ITB. Her dissertation analysed individual and collective practices that intersected with sociocultural issues in Bandung’s art scene after the 2000s. She initiated several research/curatorial projects, including the reconstruction of the artistic practice and working process of the late female artist Umi Dachlan.
Kiki now serves as the Principal Investigator of the multi-year research project Imagining Modernity: Colonial Archives and the Reimagination of Arts Pedagogy and Cultural Knowledge, funded by the Dutch Research Council under the NWA-Colonial Collections program. This project examines the politics of the colonial knowledge system embedded in art education, particularly through the study of Hindu-Buddhist objects relocated to ITB during the colonial and post-colonial periods. 
In 2024, she was one of the visiting scholars in the Faculty of Arts Indonesia Initiative at The University of Melbourne. This year, in 2026 was awarded as one of the Sir William Dobell Fellows at the Australian National University.
 

Visit this page to learn more about the Sir William Dobell Visiting Fellow Program.