11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

The future of indigenous peoples 2 2024 / Ink on paper / 152 x 244cm; The future of indigenous peoples 3 2024 Ink on paper / 138 x 114cm / Courtesy: The artist and Jhaveri Contemporary with assistance from Samdani Art Foundation NOTES 1 See Naeem Mohaiemen, ‘In the forests of the night’ , Academia , 2016, <www. academia.edu/40514480/In_the_ Forests_of_the_Night?ri_id=28387>, viewed May 2024. 2 Roaja’s first paintings were made the year after the 1997 Chittagong Hill Tracts Peace Accord was signed. He returned to this subject in 2009, a year before the Bangladeshi government coined the term ‘khudro nrigoshthi’ (‘small ethnic group’) to replace the term ‘tribal’ when describing Jumma people. See Joydeb Roaja, ‘Artist’s statement’, in Go Back To Roots [exhibition catalogue], Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, 2022, p.3. 3 Diana Campbell Betancourt, quoted in Joydeb Roaja: Art Basel Hong Kong 2023 [exhibition catalogue], Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, 2023, p.2. 4 Joydeb Roaja, correspondence with the author, May 2024. The Chittagong Hill Tracts in south-eastern Bangladesh are home to 11 different Jumma, or indigenous peoples. Their connection to their lands, as guardians of the natural environment, is the focus of Joydeb Roaja’s practice. 1 Roaja belongs to the Tripura community and is one of the area’s most prominent artists. He has become a powerful and poetic voice expressing his peoples’ symbiotic relationships to nature and the fraught history of land and human rights in the region. After studying painting, and wanting to create installations he lacked resources to realise, Roaja began staging performances at a time when there were few known performance artists in Bangladesh. Today, his work is dominated by distinctive figurative paintings and a multidisciplinary practice that continues to intersect with performance. Roaja’s practice is informed by memories of hiding in the forest from the military as a child, and by the lack of autonomy his people face in the national context. After Bangladeshi Independence in 1971, the Parbatya Chattagram Jana Samhati Samiti (PCJSS) United People’s Party was formed to represent the tribal people of the Chittagong Hill Tracts region. However, following the PCJSS’s failed bid for rights in 1972, the Shanti Bahini (Peace Corps), as it was known, was formed in response. This group, mostly comprised of Chakma people, engaged in regular, bloody conflict with the Bangladeshi government for more than 20 years. Roaja remembers the constant presence of the military while growing up, including soldiers entering his family home in search of insurgents. In 1998 Roaja began creating paintings that depicted the military on indigenous lands. He kept these works in secret, fearing reprisals from the military, and eventually destroyed them. After a decade, Roaja returned to the subject, and began interspersing references to politicians, the media, soldiers and armed vehicles of the Bangladesh army with symbols of the Chittagong Jumma peoples. 2 His paintings now address power and representation, illustrating nationalist and authoritarian figures as dark silhouetted groups dwarfed by indigenous people. The Jumma are represented at large scale, symbolising their intangible power, and morphing into depictions of the natural world — emanating a sense of harmonious connection to their sovereign place. State-driven marginalisation of indigenous peoples is a great concern for Roaja. In the mid twentieth century, around 90 per cent of the Chittagong Hill Tracts population was indigenous; now, after decades of moving ‘settlers’ into the region, only approximately half the population is indigenous. In 1962, the construction of the Kaptai Dam flooded 400 kilometres of Chakma land and displaced more than 100 000 people, in what is known as the Bor Porong, or ‘great exodus’. Roaja’s ‘Submerged dreams’ 2022 series addressed this historic moment, focusing on the Chakma Royal Palace that was left underwater following the damming. Collecting indigenous people’s memories of the palace, as well as those passed through oral traditions, Roaja composed a towering installation accompanied by paintings that imagine people from the Chittagong Hill Tracts raising the submerged palace from the bottom of the lake back to the surface. 3 ‘The future of indigenous peoples’ 2024 series, featured in the Asia Pacific Triennial, addresses indigenous people’s eviction from traditional lands and the entailing loss of villages and culture, and is particularly inspired by Roaja’s witnessing of non-indigenous people filming and interrupting traditional ceremonial practices. 4 In these unplanned compositions, Jumma motifs imbued with honour and dignity morph with nature, as ant-like groups of settlers, tourists and the media gather at their feet and helicopters and drones swarm above. The figurative contrasts between the two groups challenge conceptions of privilege and minority in the population, where Roaja’s communities command their presence and role as protectors and extensions of the land. For Roaja, his people, culture and land are not only the subject he is dedicated to safeguarding into the future, but also a source of intangible power. TARUNNAGESH TRIPURAPEOPLE BORN 1973, KHAGRACHARI, BANGLADESH LIVES+WORKS INKHAGRACHARI +CHITTAGONG, BANGLADESH JOYDEBROAJA ARTISTS+PROJECTS ASIAPACIFICTRIENNIAL 172 — 173