Wulan Dirgantoro is an art historian and curator based in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. She currently holds the position of Lecturer in Contemporary Art at the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Before joining the University of Melbourne, Wulan taught at the Master of Asian Art Histories, Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore (2014-2016), and then as a postdoctoral fellow at the Kunstgeschichte und ästhetische Praktikenprogram, Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin. She was also a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow (2018-2021) at the University of Melbourne.

As a researcher, Wulan has been working on gender, historical violence, and trauma in Indonesia, as well as Timor-Leste contemporary art and exhibitions. Her writings have been published in various books, magazines, journals and exhibition catalogues in Indonesia, Australia, England and Japan. Some of her publications include Feminisms and Indonesian Contemporary Art: Defining Experiences (Amsterdam University Press, 2017) and “After 1965: Historical Violence and Strategies of Representation in Indonesian Visual Arts” in Living Art: Indonesian Artists Engage Politics, Society and History (ANU Press, 2022). Wulan is currently involved in the Art of Peace: New Perspectives in Visual Art on Peacekeeping from the 1990s project, an Australia Research Council-funded project that examines the impact of Australian peacekeeping forces on artistic practices in post-conflict society, with a focus on Timor-Leste.

During her fellowship at HIAS, Wulan will work on her second monograph. The monograph will be the first detailed analysis of the impact of historical violence, specifically the anti-communist mass killings of 1965-66, on Indonesian contemporary art practices. The monograph argues that the mass killings and its attendant trauma generated a hitherto undetected visual sensibility in the works of Indonesian contemporary artists and art historians. The overall project seeks to expand the scope of trauma studies in visual arts by reassessing whether existing trauma theories are applicable to the histories, current situations, and futures of the Global South.

Dirgantoro’s tandem partner is Elsa Clavé, Professor of Austronesian Studies at Universität Hamburg. 

Her HIAS Fellowship is provided by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the federal and state funds acquired by Universität Hamburg in the framework of its Excellence Strategy.