Dika+Lija
Dika+Lija (Anathapindika Dai and Liza Markus) are art workers. After naive school dreams and the sobering truth of contemporary art, they found themselves sharing similar pains within their full-time jobs: Lija, currently a gallery girl who hates the art market, and Dika, once a museum staff who hated the academia. Being fugitives of their own passion-based career, they now work together to explore untamed ideas and weird paradoxes in the art world. Both shared the experience of double diaspora and quadruple identities; Dika+Lija projects are geared towards themes of identity and otherness, operating within the internet and pop-culture sphere of the contemporary global south, with the objective of detouring from academics and institution, using language, collectivism, humour, and colloquialism as their research tools, and the ratchet as their expression. Their research proposal attempts to map parallel and opposing phenomena within social media and art collectives; their beliefs, gait, and antagonisms that appear as a tool for identity-building. Stemming from the fact that collectivism in the internet space is found on platforms with user-generated content, sorted through algorithms based on aesthetics and tacit knowledge. The same process seems to happen in art collectives, where aesthetics becomes the invisible glue that holds people together without being aware of their disembodied coexistence. This project is done within the same breadth as their previous project Academic Fantasy Indonesia, Indonesia – Singapore, 2020. Dika+Lija live and work in Singapore, Jakarta and Yogyakarta, and are part of the GUDsel at GUDSKUL, Jakarta, in the Fellowship for Situated Practice.