Kuburan
installation
Materials: Fabric, Aluminium, Wood
Size: 2475 cm 1307 cm x 463cm
Kuburan—Indonesian for “grave”—is a spatial textile installation centred on an inverted Chinese-Indonesian grave, suspended overhead. Red fabric branches across the ceiling and beyond the exhibition room, evoking blood vessels and family trees. These veinlike forms draw visitors towards the grave, tracing a passage from the ephemeral to the material that mirrors Vincent Ruijters’s encounter with his ancestry.
Created for Names in Our Veins, his 2026 duo exhibition with FX Harsono at Buro Stedelijk, curated by Jo-Lene Ong, Kuburan grew from a journey with his sister to Pariaman, West Sumatra. At their uncle’s request, they searched for the grave of their great-grandmother, Tjoa Giok Lie. With help from local residents, they located the overgrown burial site, cleaned the stone, and renewed its lettering. Inspired by Harsono’s practice, Ruijters also made a rubbing of its inscription.
Standing before the grave confronted Ruijters with the distance between celebrating ancestry and caring for its material traces. In the Netherlands, his family’s heritage endured through food, photographs, stories, and fragments of language. Thousands of kilometres away, the grave had gone untended for twenty-five years. Its decay prompted a question: what if he and his sister had never come? What responsibility accompanies the claim to cherish a culture when its tangible remains are disappearing elsewhere?
The installation gives this confrontation a spatial form. Its branching textiles embody the ancestral pull that led Ruijters towards Indonesia. Their flowing contours and deep red draw on Peranakan batik from Lasem. Visitors follow these light, dispersed forms towards the dense central grave: a movement from inherited impressions towards a material presence that demands attention. Suspended upside down, the grave unsettles familiar relationships between body, ground, and sky. Its inversion draws on the imagined worlds of science fiction and games, suggesting a threshold between the present and an ancestral past.
Born in the Netherlands to a Dutch father and a Chinese-Indonesian mother, Ruijters encounters his ancestry across the distances created by migration and assimilation. Alongside Harsono’s investigations of erased names and anti-Chinese violence, Kuburan places this inherited relationship to history in conversation with an older generation’s lived experience.
The work asks how a connection to ancestry can be renewed when language, traditions, and family narratives have become fragmented, and what responsibility comes with that reconnection.