Summary: Farah Wardani (b. Jakarta, August 1, 1975), completed her undergraduate study in Graphic Design in 1998 at Trisakti University, Jakarta. In 2001 she obtained her MA in Art History (20th Century) from the Department of Historical & Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, London, UK, with a scholar-ship from the British Chevening Award. She has been active as a teacher, writer, curator and art organizer since 2002 in her home country, Indonesia. Her curatorial works comprise projects collaborating with art spaces like Cemeti Art House, ruangrupa, Edwin's Gallery, Nadi Gallery, Biasa Art Space and many others. Her writings were published in local and international mass media such as The Jakarta Post, Kompas, Art Asia Pacific, and in 2007 she co-wrote with Carla Bianpoen and Wulan Dirgantoro, a book titled Indonesian Women Artists: The Curtain Opens. Since 2007 she is the executive director of the Indonesian Visual Art Archive (IVAA) in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, which includes the IVAA Online Archive, the first online digital archive of contemporary art in the country. More recently she has been conducting research in Japan about art and cultural relations between Japan and Indonesia during WWII, under the Japan Foundation JENESYS Creators Program 2010.
The Indonesian Visual Art Archive (IVAA) is a non-profit institute based in Yogyakarta. Its main area of work is in documentation, research, library and organizing visual art education and exploration programs. IVAA also functions as a think tank or a creative laboratory to discuss various concepts and activities that support the development of visual art and contemporary culture in both practice and discourse. IVAA's documentation collection includes photographs and audio-video recordings of artists at work processes and visual art events as well as donations in the form of reference materials of various kinds starting with visual arts and culture reference books, national and international exhibition catalogues, visual artists portfolio's through to audio visual/video art works. IVAA's database contains thousands of data references and archives related to Indonesian and international visual arts, which have been collected for more than 10 years. All of this data is stored at the IVAA library in Patehan Tengah 37 in Yogya. Since the middle of 2008, IVAA has digitalized archives and developed partnerships with various fine art institutes in Indonesia in order to preserve the visual arts archives and to put this database onto an online network at
ivaa-online.org.
