Third Text

12 August 2024

Leonor Veiga

On 19 April 2024, Timor-Leste inaugurated its first-ever participation at the Venice Biennale. ^[1]  This event was filled with symbolism, since 2024 marks the 25th anniversary of the referendum vote towards the restoration of the country’s independence. ^[2]  So, the quarter-century aptly symbolises Timor-Leste’s affirmation as a sovereign nation, and this can be marked by its presence on the centre stage of world art – the Venice Biennale. Venice is not only the oldest biennale in the world, it is also the only biennale that still holds on to national participations. ^[3]  This format, which, significantly, also includes awards, leads some commentators to regard the Venice Biennale as a kind of artworld Olympics, because this division enables notions of competition between world nations. ^[4]  Yet, viewed from a positive angle, it also allows for a nation’s agency to manifest itself. In this sense, 2024 was a relevant edition. The fact that many of the participations directly alluded to Artistic Director Adriano Pedrosa’s proposed theme ‘Stranierie Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere’ led some authors to enquire whether the scheme of national representations was perhaps too rigid. ^[5]  In this edition, those who have remained in the margins of national histories – including indigenous communities, sexual minorities and displaced peoples – were very relevant, and Timor-Leste was no exception.

Maria Madeira, ‘Kiss and Don’t Tell’, the Timor-Leste Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, 20 April – 24 November 2024, courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Australia, photo by Cristiano Corte

The country offered to the Biennale audience a small yet highly effective pavilion. This event would not have been possible without the skillful work of the artist behind it, Maria Madeira, herself a foreigner in Timor-Leste due to long periods of residence outside of the country. Today, she is the most renowned artist of Timor-Leste, the first to obtain a PhD degree in Fine Arts, and the most frequent representative of the country both within and outside its borders. ^[6]  So, the success of this pavilion derives from Madeira’s intellectual curiosity and her capacity to translate into artistic forms the stories of the Timorese people. Reviews were good; the Apollo magazine editor, Eduard Behrens, shortlisted the show as a ‘must-see’ pavilion in this biennale. ^[7]  Such prominence is rare; however, it shows that the strategy outlined by the pavilion’s curator, Natalie King – one artist, one story, one artwork, one room – was successful. ^[8]

Maria Madeira and curator Natalie King, in the Timor-Leste Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, 20 April – 24 November 2024, courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Australia, photo by Cristiano Corte

As mentioned, the pavilion followed the Biennale theme. It paid tribute to one of the country’s most estranged groups of people – the anonymous Timorese women who suffered sexual violence at the hands of the Indonesian military during the occupation years (1975–1999). ^[9]  To this day, their story has remained in relative obscurity. ^[10]  The artwork chosen, Kiss and Don’t Tell, which Madeira has been reflecting on since her return to Timor-Leste in 2000, reached completion through this Venice presentation. Behrens writes that this ‘is a story of such precise horror that it is hard to say if the work lives up to it’, but he admits that uncovering it ‘is one part of what an art project can do in an international biennale’. ^[11]  His observation derives, on the one hand, from the fact that this is an untold story unveiled through a performative act and, on the other, from the continued perception that social and artistic dialogues take place within biennales.

From Kiss and Don’t Tell (2000–2023) to ‘Don’t Kiss and Tell’ (2024) ^[12]

‘Yes, I am a woman, and yes, I am proud. Yes, I am a woman, and yes, I should always shout.’ It was with these words that Madeira welcomed the audience to the performance Kiss and Don’t Tell at Spazo Ravà, an exhibition space by the Grand Canal in Venice and overlooking the Rialto Bridge. ^[13]  Kiss and Don’t Tell is a real Timorese story, unknown to most (including some Timorese), conveyed through an artwork that has been twenty-five years in the making.

Maria Madeira’s performance at the opening of ‘Kiss and Don’t Tell’, the Timor-Leste Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, 20 April – 24 November 2024, courtesy of the artist, photo by Cristiano Corte

Madeira began her narrative mentioning that when she returned to her home country in 2000, after living in exile in Portugal and Australia for twenty-five years, she noticed that the bedroom where she was staying had several lipstick marks all around the wall, all at knee-height. ‘Very strange. And I thought: children? Kids playing?’ After several months, her neighbour told her the truth: that it had been a torture room in which women were forced to put on lipstick and kiss the walls while being raped by Indonesian soldiers. Following this introduction, she guided the audience through all the emotions she felt, and still feels: despair, that she conveyed by asking ‘Why? Why? You want to make me so beautiful to hurt me’; pain, which she demonstrated by crying while singing the traditional chant Ina Lou (Dear Mother Earth) in Tetum; ^[14] rage, indicated by her punching and spitting the wall while affirming ‘No, no, no, you didn’t win’. She concluded the performance removing the lip-marks from the wall, saying ‘No more lipstick. I am free.’ By speaking these words – which also give the title to Natalie King’s catalogue essay ^[15] – the screams of these women were heard. Of the many traumas the Timorese have endured, this is clearly the least spoken of, leading Australian political scientist Michael Leach to recognise that women’s contribution to the resistance in Timor-Leste has been ‘notably absent in official commemorations and memorial landscapes’. ^[16]  This pavilion, in my opinion, and due to the scale of the tribute, resolved this question.

Maria Madeira in her performance at the opening of ‘Kiss and Don’t Tell’, the Timor-Leste Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, 20 April – 24 November 2024, courtesy of the artist, photo by Cristiano Corte

The work Kiss and Don’t Tell presented at the Biennale relates to its prior edition, but also differs from it. In 2007, when Madeira tackled this taboo subject for the first time, she conceived a wall-based installation comprised of four medium-sized canvases. When we met in July 2011 in her studio, in Dili, one of these canvases was there, leaning against a wall. I remember asking her what the lip-marks meant. Her short and concise reply, ‘Timorese women were forced to kiss the wall while being raped’ was shocking to me. Those events are intimately related to the fact that women, who stayed in the villages (while men hid in the forest hills), were easy targets. They took care of the children, fed the militia, and, significantly, passed down the local culture to future generations. One of the most important legacies these women kept was to sustain tais weaving, a form of ceremonial cloth that exists in all regions of Timor-Leste. ^[17]  Classified as an Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO since 2021, tais weaving has been used by Madeira since the mid-1990s to express her views on the occupation story. ^[18]  To Madeira, tais weavings have always held a sacred allure; as she was in exile, she used the fragments she owned with care. Sometimes, she glued them to the canvas, at other times, she applied them as readymade material. In any case, her recurrent use of tais to this day must be understood as her tribute to Timorese women. In her Venice installation, Madeira glued to the canvas fragments of tais in the shape of lips; this is a new element, showing how she perceives tais as a feminine legacy and how she interconnects their preservation to the silence of these abused women.

Detail of Maria Madeira’s installation ‘Kiss and Don’t Tell’ in the Timor-Leste Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, 20 April – 24 November 2024, courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Australia, photo by Cristiano Corte

When Maderia returned to her country in 2000, she was greeted and welcomed with betel nut chewing, a practice that, although addictive, is tolerated even for women. Remembering that initial moment, she conceived, in 2003, a group performance Mama Hamutuk – Chewing Betel Nut Together to refer to her self-discovery as a Timorese citizen and the joy and pride she felt. In 2005, facing a shortage of materials, she started using betel nut juice as paint, a practice she continues to work with. In the pavilion, in contrast, betel juice was used to express disgust and torture (the marks denote violence). This fresh usage of betel shows how this Venice exhibition represents an accummulation of the artist’s own forged artistic language while at the same time expressing her revolt for this terrible story in new ways.

Regarded as a whole, this life-size artwork transformed a Venetian palace into an abandoned torture room, similar to the one where the artist stayed in 2000. The fact that a torture room was presented in full size – in contrast with the more medium-sized 2007 canvases – demonstrates how an artwork can take twenty-five years to mature and may need an artistic team with a vision, a venue, an audience, a performance and a biennale in order to reach a point of completion. ^[19]  To those present at the opening performance, the experience of being inside a torture room of the past, stained by extreme humidity, to the passage of years, spontaneous fungi and the forced kisses of the tortured women, was highly emotional.

Maria Madeira, ‘Kiss and Don’t Tell’, the Timor-Leste Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, 20 April – 24 November 2024, courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Australia, photo by Cristiano Corte

Curator Natalie King expressed to the journalist Tim Stone that she hoped that visitors would feel ‘like walking into one of her [Maria Madeira’s] paintings’. ^[20]  Having followed Madeira’s practice since 2011, I can confirm that I have walked into the work Kiss and Don’t Tell (2007). Yet, like King also foresaw, the performance allowed the audience to penetrate Madeira’s personal pain and her need for closure on this subject. This is why she finished the performance by abruptly removing the lips – made of tais – from the wall, refusing the continuation of trauma and instead choosing to speak for the victims, hoping to heal a national wound.

Madeira’s performance was followed by a speech by Xanana Gusmão, the current Prime Minister of Timor-Leste and a man known for his artistic sensibility. His presence cannot be overstated, as the duo Madeira/Gusmão incarnated the two sides of the same coin: the resistance in the villages, conducted by these silenced women, and the guerilla fighters, who were active in the jungle hills. Gusmão reminded the audience that the twenty-four years of occupation, which caused more than 200,000 victims, did not get daily news coverage (unlike today’s conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza). Significantly, he related international disdain for the Timorese cause to Madeira’s intention to bring into the light the suffering of these Timorese women, who have been systematically bleached out of the occupation story and who have remained in silence due to the sensitive content of this issue. The hug and the tears the two shared at the end of the presentation demonstrated how wounds caused by the occupation years remain alive while also revealing the Timorese resolve to overcome tragic stories.

His Excellency PM Kay Rala Xanana Gusmão and Maria Madeira at the opening of ‘Kiss and Don’t Tell’, the Timor-Leste Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, 20 April – 24 November 2024, courtesy of the artist, photo by Cristiano Corte

Concluding remarks: What to tell next

Timor-Leste is a new country, and one where the artistic ecosystem (education, venues, market and audience) is not yet fully developed. As recently as 2022, amidst the world’s isolation caused by the COVID-19 crisis, its first art school – Arte Moris, the Free Art School – was dismantled. ^[21]  The student’s revolt was dramatic; what was once ‘the only available archive [of Timor-Leste’s contemporary art] within the country’s borders’, was probably permanently destroyed. ^[22]  Yet, Timor-Leste does have a thriving artistic community, which includes several generations of artists. So, given the complexity of the current artistic moment – one in which Timor-Leste lacks a museum and an art school – making the leap to a highly reputed and professional venue like the Venice Biennale is to be celebrated as it illustrates a sense of national pride and enthusiasm. As such, it is expected that this participation in the Venice Biennale will contribute to the restoration of the local art ecosystem while also playing a part in the pacification of the Arte Moris generation of artists.

Timor-Leste was represented in the 2024 Venice Biennale by its most prominent artist, Maria Madeira. Working with an experienced team made it possible for Madeira to complete the work Kiss and Don’t Tell in a highly engaging way. ^[23]  Since the onset of her career in the 1990s, Madeira has been an activist. Having started out as a voice against the Indonesian occupation, since her return to Timor-Leste in 2000 she has become a voice for women. In her initial days, she was curious to learn about the country’s culture and thus using betel nut and tais weaving came naturally to her. Yet, learning about these torture rooms changed the course of her activism towards the absence of references to women’s contribution to the resistance. Today, as she told me in Venice, she is trying to trace graves of Timorese women that, strangely, do not seem to exist. This demonstrates how inequality is rampant, yet how through her artistic and academic work the artist is attempting to dissect social injustices. As such, the presentation that Madeira and King conceptualised for the Venice Biennale cannot be detached from her beginnings as an activist.

The pavilion’s scale perfectly matches the country’s size. Yet in direct contrast to that scale is the profundity of the content presented, which, although extremely local due to its direct relation to a real Timorese story, conveys a global problem: that of human rights abuses against women, and particularly those resulting from conflict stories of war, occupation and colonisation. However, as most societies have historically tended to repress these events, even after conflicts have ended, by taking the opposite direction Timor-Leste has offered yet another example of greatness to the world. ^[24]  In her essay for the accompanying catalogue, Kim McGrath mentions how Timor-Leste’s choice towards the path of forgiveness is not only a characteristic of Madeira’s approach but how reconciliation has been the official direction towards a new era. ^[25]

I end with an answer to Behrens: in my opinion, the work does live up to the story. Timorese women needed to be rescued from invisibility; they needed to escape the torture rooms and be enshrined. A Venetian sixteenth-century palace is a good fit towards this end. Furthermore, I envision that, despite the fragility of the local arts’ ecosystem, Timor-Leste’s decision to continue to participate in this biennale ‘feels like it really has changed how the perception of what art is in the political echelons of Dili and feels like there could well be some decent momentum for it being a continuing platform for Timorese artists’. ^[26]  So, it should be expected that after its first successful iteration, Timor-Leste’s comeback at the Venice Biennale will demonstrate more Timorese art.

^[1]     Besides Timor-Leste, Benin, Ethiopia and Tanzania also joined the Venice Biennale for the first time in its 60th edition, bringing the total national participations to eighty-eight; see La Biennale di Venezia 2024: Partecipazioni Nationali, accessed 1 June 2024

^[2]     Timor-Leste’s independence was formally recognised on 20 May 2002

^[3]     The only other biennale that promoted national participations, the world’s second oldest, the São Paulo Biennial, was founded in 1962, but national divisions were suspended after its 26th edition in 2004. The subsequent 27th edition, entitled ‘How to Live Together’ reflects the change. Interestingly, Adriano Pedrosa, the Artistic Director of the 2024 Venice Biennale, was part of the curatorial team of the 27th edition in São Paulo. See Pat Binder and Gerhard Haupt, ‘27th São Paulo Biennial, 2006’, Universes in Universe, nd, accessed 1 June 2024

^[4]     See Bruce Altshuler, ed, Biennials and Beyond - Exhibitions That Made Art History 1962–2002, Phaidon Press, New York, 2013, p 12; and Andrew Russeth and Francesca Aton, ‘What Is the Venice Biennale? Everything You Need to Know’, ARTnews, 16 April 2024, accessed 1 June 2024. The awards were suspended in 1968 but they returned in 1986.

^[5]     See, for example, Rebecca Ann Hughes, ‘Foreign, National, Indigenous: Venice Biennale 2024 Grapples with Geographic and Personal Identities’, EuroNews, 19 April 2024, accessed 1 June 2024

^[6]     For a complete list of Madeira’s artistic activity, see Leah Batterham, ‘Chronology’, in Maria Madeira: Kiss and Don’t Tell, Natalie King, ed, SKIRA, Milan, 2024, pp 108–117

^[7]     See Edward Behrens, ‘Must-see pavilions at the Venice Biennale 2024’, Apollo, 19 April 2024, accessed 1 June 2024

^[8]     The pavilion was curated by Natalie King, who has also curated Venice Biennale participations for New Zealand in 2022 and Australia in 2016. King is one of the appointed artistic directors (with Sujan Chitrakar) of the forthcoming Kathmandu Triennale in 2026. See Natalie King’s website, accessed 1 June 2024.

^[9]     Women are not the only people who feel estranged in Timor-Leste. In an earlier writing, I have argued that the Indonesian-speaking generation (which roughly includes those born between 1970 and 1990), despite being the most active artistically, remains under-represented within power structures; see Leonor Veiga, ‘Movimentu Kultura: Making Timor-Leste’, in The Routledge Handbook on Timor-Leste, Routledge, Oxford, 2019, pp 256–258.

^[10]   To my knowledge, the only Timorese artist who has made a work directly referencing rape is Corry, in a small canvas entitled Violasaun Sexual in 1999 (2003), which was displayed at Arte Moris when I visited there in June 2011. The work of Manuel Justino ‘Bosco’ Alves do Rego equally contains references to ‘women silent resistance role during the occupation period’; see Veiga, ‘Movimentu Kultura: Making Timor-Leste’, op cit, pp 264–265.

^[11]     Behrens, ‘Must-See Pavilions at the Venice Biennale 2024’, op cit

^[12]    This wordplay is my own interpretation of the presentation

^[13]    The full performance can be seen in the official video filmed on the occasion, available here on YouTube, accessed 1 June 2024

^[14]    ‘Ina Lou’ was the title of Madeira’s first solo exhibition in Indonesia, at the Taman Ismail Marsuli, in 2014; see Maria Madeira, Ina Lou: Maria Madeira, Taman Ismail Marzuki, Jakarta, 2014

^[15]    See Natalie King, ‘No More Lipstick’, in Maria Madeira: Kiss and Don’t Tell, op cit, pp 23–33

^[16]    Michael Leach, ‘The Politics of History in Timor-Leste’, in A New Era? Timor-Leste after the UN, Lia Kent, Sue Ingram and Andrew McWilliam, eds, ANU Press, Canberra, 2015, p 42

^[17]    In 2006, Madeira produced an artwork, Troubled Spots, that deals with the variety of tais weaving in Timor-Leste’s thirteen regions; see Leonor Veiga, ‘Movimentu Kultura in Timor Leste: Maria Madeira’s “Agency”’, Cadernos de Arte e Antropologia, vol 4, no 1, 2015, pp 85–101, pp 96–97, accessed 1 June 2024

^[18]   See ibid; and Veiga, ‘Movimentu Kultura: Making Timor-Leste’, op cit

^[19]   The team that conceived the pavilion was comprised of Dr Maria Madeira, the pavilion curator, Professor Natalie King, the gallerist Anna Schwartz and historian and writer Dr Kim McGrath. They worked alongside the Secretary of State for Arts and Culture, Jorge Soares Cristovão, and Prime Minister Xanana Gusmão, to make this venue possible. See ‘Timor-Leste presents “Kiss and Don’t Tell” by artist Maria Madeira at Venice Biennale’, ABC News Australia, 22 May 2024 (on YouTube), accessed 1 June 2024

^[20]    See Tim Stone, ‘“Trauma, hope and healing”: a closer look at Timor-Leste’s first-ever Venice Biennale pavilion’, The Art Newspaper, 19 April 2024, accessed 1 June 2024

^[21]   See Annie Sloman, ‘Living Art under attack in Timor-Leste: Arte Moris’, New Mandala (blog), 10 January 2022, accessed 1 June 2024

^[22]    See Veiga, ‘Movimentu Kultura: Making Timor-Leste’, op cit, p 263

^[23]   The pavilion’s success also pertains to the accompanying book edited by Natalie King, which was distributed inside totem tais bags made by women weavers under the auspices of the Alola Foundation

^[24]   There are several histories of acts of rape against women in war scenarios. In 2007, reports about comfort women during World War II went public. While the majority of these victims were already deceased, the fact that these practices shaped the conflict in Asia, and compensations were only offered as recently as 2023, shows how violence against women has historically been downsized. See, for example, Lou Newton, ‘Japan Ordered to Compensate Wartime “Comfort Women”’, BBC News Asia, 23 November 2023, accessed 1 June 2024.

^[25]   Kim McGrath, ‘From Foreignness to Fraternity’, in Maria Madeira: Kiss and Don’t Tell, op cit, pp 49–56

^[26]   Kim McGrath, email correspondence with the author

Leonor Veiga, currently a Guest Researcher at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS), is an art historian and curator based in Montpellier, France. She was a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Fine Arts School of the University of Lisbon from 2020–2023. She obtained her PhD from Leiden University in 2018 with her dissertation ‘The Third Avant-garde: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia Recalling Tradition’.