In December 2024, I returned to Jakarta and visited the Repatriasi (Repatriation) exhibition at the National Museum of Indonesia. This temporary exhibition is part of the museum’s highly anticipated reopening after the September 2023 fire which centered on the theme “Reimagining Cultural Inheritances.” It follows previous successful exhibitions on repatriated materials to Indonesia albeit in smaller manners, ie. Pamor Sang Pangeran (Prestige of the Prince) at the National Museum in November 2020 and Repatriasi (Repatriation) at the National Gallery in December 2023. The most recent 2024 Repatriasi exhibition put its main spotlight to Singasari statues, displaying a complete set—Prajnaparamitha, Ganesha, Durga, Bhairawa, Mahakala, Nandiswara, and Brahma—once dispersed to Dutch institutions since the early 19th century. The Pita Maha collection, distinct for its non-colonial provenance, was displayed in a separate room. The second floor showcased Prince Diponegoro’s personal belongings, regalia from Lombok and Klungkung, and objects from the now-defunct Nusantara Museum.
During the visit, it became clear to me that the museum’s reimagining seems to focus largely on rearranging visual and spatial arrangements of the galleries, with a strong emphasis on digital technologies and interactive display features. While these updates added a modern layer to the viewing experience, they did little to challenge the deeper, underlying narratives. Instead, the museum continued to echo a familiar Indonesia-centric storyline that has long framed these objects’ histories. Upon entering the Repatriasi exhibition space, visitors were greeted by towering statues from Singasari, arranged in a circular formation. Each statue stood on a sleek black pedestal, cordoned off with red ropes meant to discourage physical contact. Dim orange lighting cast dramatic shadows from below, while the statues were set against dark walls—an aesthetic clearly designed to emphasize their grandeur as national treasures. As is common in such displays, the accompanying labels offered iconographic details and outlined the statues’ functions within ancient Javanese culture. The most notable feature was an interactive touchscreen that allowed visitors to trace the movement of the statues over time—a rare attempt at engaging the viewer more deeply, and arguably the exhibition’s most promising element.
Yet, what caught my attention most during the visit was a particular historical account presented on the second floor, specifically within the gallery label discussing the return of the Lombok regalia. While the label acknowledged that the regalia had been looted following a military assault, it also claimed that the Nagarakretagama manuscript had been “rescued” by the Dutch philologist Jan Laurens Andries Brandes before it could be destroyed. This kind of (post-)colonial narrative—portraying colonial figures as protectors of heritage—is still common in Indonesia today. The case of the Nagarakretagama stood out to me, prompting a recollection of my visit to the Museum Arkeologi (Museum of Archaeology) in Badung, Bali, in July 2024. There, in a gallery dedicated to local manuscript culture, a similar version of the story was displayed. Once again, Brandes was credited with having heroically saved the manuscript. This repeated framing, which follows a familiar curatorial pattern, overlooks the fact that the manuscript was only in danger because of the colonial violence that accompanied the Dutch assault on the Lombok court in the first place. The underlying suggestion that Indonesians should feel grateful for this so-called act of preservation via “rescue” comes from the historiographical positioning of Majapahit. With its self-aggrandizing sphere of influence beautifully narrated in Nagarakretagama—but also in Pararaton—as proto-Indonesian polity, Majapahit serves as a legitimising device for the newly founded nation-state (see Bloembergen and Eickhoff 2020).
The Repatriasi exhibition, with its strong nationalistic tone, reflects a growing trend: returned objects are often absorbed into a state-driven narrative of historical greatness, already mentioned in a previous blog. Notwithstanding, I wonder if it would be productive to use the exhibition as a pivot to better understand local, or rather localised, modes of object ownership. In the following paragraphs, I draw on reflections from the CO-OP second cohort meeting to examine the implications of returning objects to their “origin,” and to explore how attending to the locality of objects may illuminate the spatial and temporal frameworks into which they are reinserted, particularly in relation to practices of heritage conservation.
In July 2024, the CO-OP cohort descended upon the island of Java, Indonesia, for the second iteration of our critical thinking lab seminar. Our chosen site for this meeting was Mount Lawu, a mountain steeped in both spiritual significance and political history. Nestled within a lush, mist-veiled landscape dotted with ancient cultural ruins, the location offered an ideal setting for our exploration of ideas at the intersection of politicised heritage, local epistemology, and paradigms of restitution. Our indoor discussions focused primarily on pressing questions surrounding the replication and ownership of cultural objects—debates that remain highly charged, particularly in postcolonial contexts. These sessions were particularly generative, not only in unpacking the practical and legal dimensions of restitution, but also in interrogating the theoretical frameworks that could disrupt these debates. For my part, I found the collective engagement especially productive in helping me reconsider my own positionality as both an Indonesian citizen and an international scholar situated within transnational academic and heritage networks. This dual positioning has afforded me a unique vantage point, and within our conversations, I began to think more deeply about how this hybridity might be mobilized to unsettle the essentialist assumptions that continue to contrive dominant paradigms of restitution in Southeast Asia.
On the morning of our third day in Lawu, we took our critical exchanges outdoors to Sukuh temple, a 15th-century site built during the waning days of the Majapahit empire in Java. As expected, the temple appeared well-maintained, its neatly trimmed grounds reflecting years of state-led restoration shaped by a particular vision of cultural heritage in Indonesia. This vision rests on the assumption that such ancient temples are “dead” relics of the past (see Bloembergen and Eickhoff 2020), and as such, their sacred spaces—that is, the immediate surrounding usually bordered by ancient walls if still existed—should remain uninhabited and cleared of people to preserve a manicured image believed to resemble their historical form. As our group wandered the site, absorbed in conversation about Sukuh’s layered history, our attention was abruptly pulled away by the heavy sound of rock music blasting from a nearby campsite. Words soon spread that it came from a local scout group setting up for an evening gathering. To me, this unexpected sonic disruption felt like a productive rupture in challenging the scripted solemnity often imposed on encounters with Javanese temple ruins and offering a reminder of the vibrant, living landscape that still surrounds them.
The Sukuh encounter—where a carefully curated temple space was pierced by the sonic presence of a rocking music—highlights how locality is not a static condition but a layered, contested process. Drawing on anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s notion of locality (1995) as a relational and phenomenological quality, we see how the site is actively produced through both formal heritage frameworks and everyday social practices. The tension reveals not only a collapse of meaning, but also a fragile moment of productive rupture—one that localizes temporality itself and challenges essentialist constructions of heritage space. By understanding the locality of Sukuh as a situated and relational phenomenon, the site attests the local as nothing static, but a locale where multiple localities are performed and negotiated in real time; sometimes in harmony, but often in friction. This reflection is useful for thinking about the localisation of spatial and temporal meaning, in particular how a place is not just a backdrop for cultural memory but a dynamic site where different histories, praxes, and socio-political actors intersect.
Within the national museum context, the Repatriasi exhibition risks becoming a missed opportunity to critically engage with the afterlives of returned objects, beyond marking their physical return. Many artifacts appear subsumed into a dominant national narrative that frames pre-colonial empires like Majapahit as the foundation of Indonesian identity—a narrative shaped by post-independence needs for legitimacy. As anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1995) notes, this reflects the strategic production of locality, where space, history, and culture are selectively stabilized to construct a coherent national identity. In this process, heritage objects are not only physically repatriated but ideologically integrated into a symbolic order that privileges unity over complexity. This mirrors what postcolonial thinker Gayatri Spivak terms strategic essentialism, which tends to obscure the colonial frameworks through which these objects were once studied and categorized—frameworks that continue to inform heritage imaginaries today. While such strategies may have served a formative purpose in early postcolonial Indonesia, their relevance now warrants reexamination. Does this remain the most meaningful way to engage with cultural heritage? One might argue that it persists, particularly through a state-led archaeological model that assumes local communities are disengaged—often because their relationships with these objects fall outside institutional or academic frameworks. This raises a further question: could alternative local practices around objects like the Singasari statues exist beyond the museum’s walls?
Even so, the boundary between national and local is far from clear-cut. Consider the proliferation of newly forged keris following the 2020 return of Prince Diponegoro’s weapon from the Netherlands, originally taken at the end of his rebellion in 1830 (see Hausler and Selter 2025) On the surface, this appears to be a grassroots cultural response—a reclaiming of identity and proximity to a historical figure whose legacy holds deep symbolic weight in traditional terms. But even this resurgence is not entirely free from the gravitational pull of the national story. The very act of replicating Diponegoro’s keris is rooted in his state-sanctioned image: a hero of resistance, a proto-nationalist figure whose personal belongings become proxies for collective pride. I have argued elsewhere (Ardiyansyah 2021) that Diponegoro’s canonisation as ultimate hero by Indonesia’s founding fathers emerged subversively from the colonial regime’s overt disdain for his rebel act, as reflected in early 20th-century colonial educational materials. Hence, we can see today that the “local”, or rather localised, response is shaped—if not made possible—by the nationalisation of Diponegoro himself. Thus, these two forces are not opposites but rather co-constitutive; they exist in a state of mutual dependence.
I believe that to understand localities today requires acknowledging them not as fixed containers of traditional values but as a locale where meanings are continuously reproduced through interaction and negotiation. This raises a fundamental tension: which meanings are we conserving when we speak of locality in contemporary global terms? Can national and local narratives coexist, or are we simply exploiting their tension—drawing meaning and legitimacy from the friction without resolving it? More provocatively, are we romanticising the “alternative” while still operating within the architecture of the dominant? And how, indeed, should we account for the colonial legacies that have become embedded in localized narratives of heritage? When these narratives—about temples, manuscripts, heroes’ belongings—have been shaped not only by indigenous memory but also by the interpretive frameworks of colonial scholarship, do they themselves become part of the “local” that we are tasked with conserving?
These are not a comfortable line of questioning, especially from my own vantage point. Colonialism did not simply take away; it also left behind modes of seeing, categorizing, and valuing objects that have been internalized within postcolonial heritage discourse of Indonesian nation-state. Should, or could, I as an Indonesian citizen, disentangle these layered histories? There is a danger in assuming that we can simply “purify” the local from its colonial sediment. But there is also risk in passively accepting all inherited narratives as sanctified simply because they have sedimented into place. In this sense, restitution has become a paradox: to have historical objects returned to its local origin today is ultimately to make choices—about what (meanings) to protect, what (histories) to question, and what (memories) to let go. And these choices are never neutral. They are ethical, political, and epistemological. Positioning myself as a scholar (and Indonesian citizen), I must ask not only “what is local?” but also, “whose locality is this?” and “for whom is it being preserved?” Perhaps the most honest form of conservation is not resisting change, but preserving space for contested meanings and multiple temporalities to coexist—especially when they unsettle us.
References:
Ardiyansyah, Panggah. “Restitution And National Heritage: (Art) Historical Trajectories Of Raden Saleh’s Paintings.” In Louise Tythacott and Panggah Ardiyansyah (eds), Returning Southeast Asia’s Past: Objects, Museums, and Restitution, pp. 163–186. NUS Press, 2021.
Appadurai, Arjun. “The production of locality.” In Richard Fardon (ed), Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge, pp. 208–229. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.
Bloembergen, Marieke, and Martijn Eickhoff. The Politics of Heritage in Indonesia: A Cultural History. Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Hausler, Kristin, and Elke Selter. Beyond Restitution: Exploring the Stories of Cultural Objects After their Return. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025.