Didot Klasta is a multi-disciplinary artist-activist from Indonesia who moved to Australia in 2012. For 25 years he has worked across art forms from painting and installation to performance. In his current project, Victims and Versions, Didot is researching the victims of a brutal campaign against the left and popular movements in Indonesia in 1965 that left up to 3 million people dead.
 
BIO
Didot Klasta is a multi-disciplinary artist-activist from Indonesia who moved to Australia in 2012. For 25 years he has been exploring visual art, theatre, creative writing, video, dance and music that work in with his social activism.
During his career, Didot Klasta has held many visual art exhibitions both in Indonesia and Australia, created cross-disciplinary works, conducted community theatre projects and developed experimental methods based on Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. He has written theatre scripts, contributed to literary publications, run his own underground bulletin, published a book of his poems and has routinely performed as a ‘stand up’ poet.
Visual art, theatre and creative writing are the main work of Didot Klasta. Visual art enables him to release his suppressed soul caused by inhuman conditions of social reality. His theatre based on Augusto Boal’s method provides him with an exciting cultural tool for creating a bridge toward the next step of social transformation at a community level. The power of written language allows him to become a provocateur with tons of explicit social-political commentaries.
Didot Klasta is co-founder and director of Kalangan Kultura Media; a non profit organization who works with grassroots communities, promoting social transformation through cultural media. He has facilitated numerous project in villages in Central Java, including theatre, children’s learning centre, and documentation of traditional folk art and cultural events.
For Didot Klasta art is for humanization, art is part of a universal movement against rotten, decadent, inhumane ‘civilization’. Therefore Didot Klasta is an artivist.
 
Image: Didot Klasta, SUPPRESSION #27, 2011. Ballpoint on paper. Image courtesy & copyright the artist.