The Missing Coke Bottle

Abstract

Indonesian artist activist Arahmaiani’s art installations and performances combine western and non-western cultural elements in such a way as to highlight the role of capitalist globalization as an exploitative and destructive neo-colonial force in places like Indonesia. Beginning in the 1990s, Arahmaiani’s work featured a Coca-Cola bottle in a prominent position, emphasizing the effects of commodification and Americanization on indigenous and non-western cultures. Her work is always intersectional, connecting injustices linked to patriarchy, class, and environmental destruction to global political and economic structures in ways not typical of western liberal human rights discourses, such as that demonstrated by academic Lucinda Peach in her own human rights critique. Arahmaiani’s work thus serves as a stark contrast to western liberal human rights discourse that urges academics and activists to redirect their gaze away from the cultural idiosyncrasies of non-western nations towards the western roots of global structures of inequality.