Mia Bustam Digital Project: An Update and Call for Support
At the recent workshop, “Recovering Herstory” (17 March 2026), Astrid Reza presented her ongoing exhibition project on Mia Bustam as a curatorially-centred practice of recovering herstory. Although Astrid was unable to join us in person, her work inspired everyone in the room, and this write-up serves both as a reflection of what she shared and as in invitation to engage with - and support - the project she described.
Mia Bustam’s story sits at the very heart of what the Women in Exile digital timeline and recovery project is working to make visible. Born in Purwodadi Central Java on 4 June 1920, Mia Bustam was an Indonesian artist, writer and translator who navigated the turbulent currents of postwar Indonesia as a single mother of eight children from 1959 onwards. She was a member of Seniman Indonesia Muda (SIM, Indonesian Young Artists) and later joined Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat (LEKRA, Institute for the People’s Culture), rising to become the head of LEKRA Yogyakarta in 1963. After the 30 September Movement of 1965, she was imprisoned without trial for nearly thirteen and a half years by the New Order regime, moved from one camp to camp, her life and work severed from public memory.
Mia Bustam wrote four memoirs, written during the military regime and continuing until the end of her life. They offer a rare and vivid account of a woman navigating Indonesia’s suppressed leftist past. Her visual works, however, have largely disappeared from the record: missing, unfinished or simply passed over in the historiography of Indonesian art. When she passed away in 2011 at the age of 91, her written archives remained in the care of her family, held under fragile conditions and with very limited resources.
It is precisely this kind of gap that the Women in Exile project seeks to address. Mia Bustam’s story is one thread in a larger effort to reconstructure the digital timelines and herstories of Southeast Asian women whose contributions to anti-colonial, nationalist and feminist movements have been overlooked, suppressed or never recorded. Her case demonstrated both the urgency and the difficulty of this work: recovery is possible (and necessary!), but it requires care, resources and sustained collective effort.
Through her thesis research on Mia Bustam’s memoirs, Astrid Reza identified the pressing need for digitalization of Mia Bustam’s remaining archive. Last July 2025, an unexpected opportunity arose when Biennale Jogja offered to host an exhibition of the Mia Bustam archive and artworks. A small dedicated team rose to the occasion, and the exhibition opened successfully from 5 October to 20 November 2026 at Biennale Jogja 18, held at Vredeburg Fort, Yogyakarta, Indonesia.
In the course of preparing that exhibition, approximately 20 percent of the Mia Bustam archive was digitalized and made publicly accessible for the first time. The Mia Bustam Project team, working together in close collaboration with the family and with their full consent, continues to slowly digitalize and catalogue the remaining archive independently.
To support Mia Bustam Project’s ongoing digitalization process, consider purchasing the exhibition zine, to be published in ENGLISH by mid-April 2026, along with a set of 5 postcards reproducing Mia Bustam’s artworks. This is available for purchase for AUD$20 (excluding postage). Please contact: miabustamproject@gmail.com. All proceeds go directly to supporting the ongoing digitisation of the archive.