Indra was sitting with Ade and Reza outside a bar in Istanbul relieving the pain with a drink. He had just had the back of his hand tattooed with a gigantic Taurus zodiac sign.
It was 2005, and I was in town with Tone, my partner in crime in our newly founded curatorial collective, Kuratorisk Aktion. We were researching decolonial artists, and while Tone had been to Indonesia and made friends with ruangrupa, hanging out at the bar and helping them kill the pain would be my first encounter. Soon after, we met again, this time in Tórshavn in the North Atlantic. Kuratorisk Aktion had invited ruangrupa to the third act of Rethinking Nordic Colonialism: A Postcolonial Exhibition Project in Five Acts (2006), which had started in Iceland and moved on to Greenland before arriving in the Faroe Islands (and eventually going to Sápmi and its final destination: rethinking-nordic-colonialism.org).
Proclaiming themselves as a minority in the Faroes, our Indonesian friends turned the tables on the only seemingly homogenous micronation of 48,000 souls with their project You’re Welcome, hacking Kuratorisk Aktion’s role as hosts for our esteemed artists, performers, and activists from all over the globe. By the time we left Tórshavn, all of us were regulars at their Chinese restaurant and fans of their local football team. Everybody “jumped around” to House of Pain’s hit song. Act 3 was forever redubbed “The Asian Act of Taurus.”