Biography

Nuraini Juliastuti co-founded KUNCI Cultural Studies Center, in Yogyakarta, Indonesia in 1999. KUNCI is a research collective which focuses on creative experimentation and speculative inquiry between theory and practice. Her education background includes a MSc in Contemporary Asian Studies at the University of Amsterdam and a PhD in Cultural Anthropology at Leiden University. Nuraini’s research and writings have been published widely in Indonesian media and cultural organisations including Tempo, Kompas, The Jakarta Post, Indonesian Visual Art Archive; international art publications including Art Monthly Australia, Metropolis M, Afterall Journal, Discipline; artists’ books and monographs from Stedelijk Museum and Sternberg Press; and the refereed academic journals Jurnal Perempuan and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. With KUNCI Nuraini has produced a body of research that employs exhibition and gathering as modes of presentation and engagement. Projects include Made in Commons (2013) at Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam and Jogja National Museum (2015); and Tropical Dissonance: Decolonising Knowledge through Colonial Archives (2017) at the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam.

KUNCI is currently working on School of Improper Education (2016-2019), a project that experiments with different modes of pedagogical practices and implements them within contemporary social environments. And Nuraini is developing Domestic Notes, a publication-based project that uses domestic and migrant spaces as sites to discuss everyday politics, the organisation of makeshift support systems and alternative cultural production.