Choy Ka Fai

In collaboration with Raja Kirik and Dewi Arum Dolalak Group
Born 1979 in Singapore
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney

Exodus, 2024
single channel HD video duration 18 minutes 52 seconds

Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with generous assistance from Goethe-Institut Australia. Courtesy the artist.

Gathered around the campfire one hot Javanese night in the 1930s, a contingent of Dutch soldiers drunkenly sang and danced while a group of Indonesian farmers watched from afar, mimicking the men’s strange, rhythmic movements.

And so, Dolalak was born.

Something of a cultural constellation, Dolalak performers cosplay in Dutch military regalia for trance-like performances of traditional Javanese dance, melodic Islamic poems and songs of ancestral spirits. Popular among young Indonesian TikTok influencers who dance Dolalak to the tunes of Indonesian pop music (Dangdut Koplo), the ritual sits within a deeply layered history.

The same rich source resulted in an Indonesian band being hailed as the greatest live act in mid-century Europe some 20 years after the development of Dolalak. Following the Dutch failure to re-invade Indonesia after the Second World War, a number of Dutch-speaking Indonesian musicians, primarily from the Maluku Islands, were exiled to the Netherlands. In the same way that Dolalak rose from a colonial clash of cultures, Indo-Rock emerged in the 1950s/1960s when these musicians began to meld Western, Indonesian and Kroncong music, a specific genre in Indonesia played on Portuguese-introduced instruments. This fusion gave rise to leading bands like the Tielman Brothers, who reached stardom as icons of Dutch and West German rock ’n’ roll.

In Exodus, the Dewi Arum Girls (TikTok stars) dance Dolalak to a remix of the Tielman Brothers, meditating on the colonial resonances that linger. They dance like spirits, in the reverberations of Dolalak, Indo-Rock and contemporary digital culture.

Choy Ka Fai is a Berlin-based Singaporean artist. His multidisciplinary art practice situates itself at the intersection of dance, media art and performance. Through research expeditions, pseudo-scientific experiments and documentary performances, Ka Fai appropriates technologies and narratives to imagine new futures of the human body and speculate on realms of reality other than our own. 

Read more about the 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, by purchasing the catalogue here.