Zavé Martohardjono

About

zavé martohardjono is a queer, trans, Indonesian-American artist working in performance, dance, installation, video, and poetry. Dwelling in their ancestors’ mythologies, with dreams of a more just future, they make work that contends with the political histories our bodies carry. zavé’s work is concerned with and prompted by inquiry into whether and how embodied healing, anti-colonial storytelling, and political education can de-condition the body, reconjure liberatory memory, and untangle entrenched assimilation. zavé’s dance improvisations, experimental works, multimedia works and writing address and subvert political histories.

zavé has been presented at the 92Y, BAAD!, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Center for Performance Research, El Museo del Barrio, HERE Arts, Issue Project Room, The Kennedy Center, Storm King Art Center, the Wild Project, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Boston Center for the Arts, Tufts University, and elsewhere in the U.S. Internationally, they have shown films and performed in Amsterdam, Berlin, Glasgow, Zurich, Skopje, and Jakarta. They were a 2022 MRX/Movement Research Exchange program artist in Skopje, Macedonia, 2021 NYPL Dance Research Fellow, 2020 Gibney Dance in Process artist, 2019 Movement Research AIR, 2017-2018 LMCC Workspace Resident, and a 2011 EMERGENYC artist. Their work has been written about in BOMB Magazine, Brooklyn Rail, Culturebot, Hyperallergic, and The New York Times.

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Open Studio at CEC Arts in Philadelphia | October 22, 2022

Join me and my collaborator Andrew Suseno for an open studio exploration of three finger salute, an in-development performance that is inspired by protest gestures such as the three finger salute seen in 2021 anti-military political resistance in Myanmar and in 2014 Thai protests. Among many things, the salute symbolizes Southeast Asian solidarity. More details and information to join is here.

Catch my poems in We Want It All

I’m honored to be part of this luscious, powerful collection We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics edited by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel, published by Nightboat Books. The anthology features over 70 intergenerational artists writing in dialogue with emancipatory political movements, imagining an altogether overturned world in poems that pursue trans relationships to desire, embodiment, housing, sex, ecology, history, pop culture, and the working day.