Emiria Sunassa’s life was surrounded by ambiguity, and her works tend to concentrate on the diverse peoples of the Indonesian archipelago, whom she brought into view for the Javanese audience in Batavia. Consistent with the raw, expressive quality of Sunassa’s body of work, the figure in this painting is rendered in bold, sweeping lines, while the face is mask-like, highlighted in a startling green against a darkened ground. In the image, an Irian (Papuan) man is shown holding birds-of- paradise to his chest. Birds-of-paradise are sacred to the Indigenous people in Papua, but their feathers were also a prized commodity among foreign hunters and traders. Thus, they can be seen a symbol of the exploitation of Papua’s natural resources. Sunassa claimed descent from the Sultan of Tidore, an island in the Maluku archipelago, which had historically ruled parts of West Papua. As a result, at a crucial time when both Indonesia and West Papua were struggling for their independence (from the late 1940s to the early 1960s), Sunassa claimed to be the rightful ruler of the region. Her status was never officially accepted but has complex implications for her paintings of Papuan scenes.
This is the first time the work of Emiria Sunassa is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Phoebe Scott
