Karyn Putri Sanusi

MA Arts Pedagogy and Practice

2025

Karyn is an artist and educator based between Jakarta and Tangerang, Indonesia.

Through listening, translating, writing, game, film, sound, rituals and other site-specific practices, she encourages her students to create emancipating modes of coming and being together in response to the ever-changing political ecologies of their surroundings.

Most of her recent exhibitions include: Kukuh Bertumbuh (Cemara 6 Galeri and Jakarta Arts Council, Jakarta, 2025); Elegi Buih (Art Agenda, Jakarta, 2023); and The Hauntologists (BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Jakarta, Tangerang, Utrecht, 2022). Karyn was part of the GUDsel at Gudskul, Jakarta in the BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice 2021–2022 and The World is Our Household! in the Struggles for Sovereignty Fellowship 2021.

She is currently continuing her poetic memory and archive fieldwork in Kampung Dadap, a fisherman village in Tangerang, Indonesia.

https://www.instagram.com/alexandrakaryn/

alx.karyn@gmail.com

Thesis abstract

Memory as poetic materiality of collectivity and resistance: A marginalised community's fight against political, cultural and ecological resistance

Kampung Dadap is a small fisherman village in Tangerang, Indonesia. In the 50 years of their resistance against political, cultural and ecological oppression, a time to recollectivise for the renewal of hope has never been more urgent. In order to reconstruct this sense of collectivity while dwelling in such precarious living conditions, a unique quality emerges to elongate the breath of their resistance—the poetic. Forms of poetic resistance such as storytelling practices, writings on the wall, arts and culture festivals, and indigenous coastal rituals keep aglow the quality of their hope and love for their home and community.

Through the conscious recall and archiving of Kampung Dadap's memories, rituals and languages in all their spectrum of visibilities, the entire process of creating this thesis, as much as the thesis itself, is a continuous, active, present and political effort in reframing the margin as more than sites of deprivation, but rather, a space of possibilities—a space to witness, imagine and create new worlds.

This thesis invites all of us to identify where we stand in the disparity of the world within the crucible of our subjectivity, by being a part of Kampung Dadap’s rememberer: to see them as people with hope, love and memories, which brings into light the qualities of their lives in entire ecologies.

School of Creative
Industries

Karyn Putri Sanusi

Work

Thesis abstract

Work experience