Even as its political borders remain in flux, the fraught geographic construct of “Southeast Asia” has recently proven quite a useful tool in the globalized art world, offering a foil for the hegemony of Western artistic discourse, aiding the purported decolonization of cultural institutions and providing a conceit to harness the proliferation of national, ethnic, and religious formations existing within the region. The Biennale Jogja XV mobilized these contested boundaries to explore what it means to be peripheral.

This was not the first time the biennial looked to the so-called margins. The