Fitri Dwi Kurniasih

(she/her)
b 1981, Yogyakarta, Indonesia
Lives and works in Yogyakarta, Indonesia

A vocal activist for women’s rights and environmental issues, Fitri Dwi Kurniasih (DK) is closely involved with spaces of critical, socio-political dialogue in Indonesia, working with underground art communities and the Yogyakarta-based protest band, Dendang Kampungan. It is this attentiveness toward the forms of collective mobilisation and demands for change occurring at a grassroots level that informs and inspires DK’s series of graphic black-and-white woodcut prints. The prints each document some of the most pressing and contentious flashpoints in contemporary Indonesian politics, including the brutal repression of West Papuans at the hands of the Indonesian military, and the rapid expansion of the palm oil plantation industry at the cost of the natural environment. But in the final print, DK draws our attention to the forces of local resistance. Through a lengthy process of drawing, etching and printing, DK documents in painstaking detail the defiant figures of women who shackled their feet with cement to protest the construction of a cement factory on indigenous land in Kendeng–a startling testament to the crucial and often deeply physical role played by indigenous women at the forefront of such movements.