Imagine a smart, cheeky report with a playful visual language. Nothing like the typical output of human-rights groups. But, its harmless-looking cover, belies its contents. Koalisi Seni, an Indonesian advocacy group for artistic freedom, has just released Cerita Lama Berulang Kembali (Same Old, Same Old). Inside: sixty cases of censorship, harassment, intimidation. The highest figure in a decade.
Numbers on a page, though, can feel abstract. On a recent afternoon in Jakarta, Ratri Ninditya, the group’s research coordinator, and Hafez Gumay, its advocacy manager, walked me through the findings. The story is blunt: violations rose from forty-two in 2022 to fifty in 2023 and sixty in 2024. Behind the pastel graphics lies a pattern that has become wearyingly familiar: once again, the state is the chief perpetrator.
The report’s title, with its air of weary repetition, signals how routine such abuses have become. The sharp rise suggests a shift, not only in what is happening but also in how Indonesians talk about it. Human-rights groups warn that populist policies have shrunk civic space and terrorised artists, normalising self-censorship. As the report notes, repression rarely arrives overnight. It builds slowly… Through fear, legal uncertainty, and the state’s disregard for its citizens’ rights. In this climate, art in Indonesia, the report concludes, has lost much of its role as a medium of reflection, a way out of daily injustice. Freemuse’s State of Artistic Freedom 2025, in the chapter titled “Indonesia: Authoritarianism Strikes Back,” offers further evidence of this trend.
What are the reasons for the jump from 2023? Ratri explained that the team had sharpened its methods. “We already had some patterns from previous years, so we used more specific keywords to search online,” she said. Music censorship in Sumatra, for instance, has a long history, so the researchers dug deeper with targeted searches. More surfaced.
When Politics Heat Up, Censorship Tightens
Better tools and new key words brought not just more numbers but new categories. Sexual violence in the arts began to appear. “I think people are starting to speak up more, especially after the law on sexual violence was passed recently,” Ratri said. In traditional apprenticeship systems such as nyantrik, where students live under one roof with a master, violations sometimes involve minors. Journalists began to report on such cases, which then surfaced in Koalisi Seni’s data.
Koalisi Seni team uses Uwazi, an open-source human-rights database, allowing cases to be catalogued in internationally compatible ways. Victims are anonymised, as are perpetrators when individuals are involved. Records are backed up offline to guard against cyberattacks. “Websites of human-rights NGOs get attacked here all the time,” Hafez noted, “not just by the state, but also by online gambling syndicates, which often hack NGO sites to hijack their traffic for ads or scams.”
Of the sixty documented violations, more than half, thirty-eight, were in music. Theatre accounted for six, film and dance five each, visual art four, and literature two. One case stood out in the visual-arts field: in Jakarta, the National Gallery attempted to censor five paintings by the renowned artist Yos Suprapto, which criticized state oppression of farmers and evoked a former president. The move backfired; images of the works spread online and drew public support. But as the report warns, virality can amplify the message while also heightening personal and professional risks for artists.
Music remains especially vulnerable. Police raids in Sumatra, often carried out under anti-drug campaigns, routinely shut down concerts. Local governments have passed regulations banning entire genres, sometimes even single instruments. “It’s absurd,” Ratri said. “The problem isn’t drugs, the musicians become collateral damage.” These aren’t pop stars but local performers, whose livelihoods vanish overnight. Artists, Koalisi Seni observes, are often the first to feel the tremors of political, economic, and social upheaval. As politics heat up, censorship tightens.
Numbers Never Fully Capture Reality
Reports of sexual assault and harassment rose in 2024, especially in performance genres. Dangdut folk singers, who often perform amid dancing crowds and cash-waving fans, face particular risks. “Of course, women are the most impacted,” Ratri said. “And gender-diverse performers, like Indigenous and trans women, are also censored and banned from staging events.”
Still, the data reveals only what surfaces. Fifty-nine of the sixty violations came through media coverage; only one was reported directly to Koalisi Seni’s complaint channel. With only five staff members, the group sees its role less as a direct-aid provider than as a monitor. But during crises, the complaint channel becomes more visible, especially through Instagram campaigns with self-help guides for artists facing harassment.
The report stresses that numbers never fully capture reality. Coverage is concentrated in Java and Jakarta, while artists outside urban centres face different conditions and rarely appear in the data. To close that gap, Koalisi Seni plans more workshops with local journalists, teaching them how to identify and frame artistic freedom cases. “Now more journalists use the term ‘artistic freedom,’” Hafez said. “Before, they only said ‘freedom of expression.’ That’s a good sign.” The group also wants to improve outcome-tracking, so the database reflects not only violations but also resolutions. When perpetrators are arrested or charges dropped, cases are updated. “It’s important to show good outcomes too,” Ratri said. But caution is needed: big cases are easily politicised, and Koalisi Seni avoids letting their work be co-opted by parties seeking advantage.
Yet blind spots remain. “There’s complexity on the ground we can’t capture,” Ratri reflected. “Political motives, local dynamics… If there’s no published evidence, we can’t include it.” Repression, paradoxically, makes some things easier: the harsher the crackdown, the more people write on social media and in mainstream outlets, leaving a trail to document.
Irony And Satire as a Form of Resistance
The group’s playful cover design, with its pastels and cartoons, was no accident. Hoping to connect with younger audiences, the team leaned into irony. Hafez explained, “It’s a way of playing hide-and-seek with authority,” signalling that even under pressure, irony and satire can still be forms of resistance.
That resistance is not without risk. Just recently, after a motorcyclist was killed by a police truck, protests swept across Indonesia and Koalisi Seni’s staff were told to work from home. Yet even as Jakarta’s streets grew tense, poetry readings and performances about state violence went ahead. Online, words and images spread.
The cultural field in Indonesia is threatened yet thriving. Survival takes many forms. For Koalisi Seni, Same Old, Same Old is more than a report. It is a survival strategy: part database, part satire, part warning. It captures the slow grind of repression, hidden beneath a colourful façade.
*This article published in Freemuse.
Musa Igrek 