Nuntun, Nata, Nonton

There are three Javanese words for what inherited wisdom needs in order to keep travelling: tuntunan, how it teaches; tatanan, how it is held in order; tontonan, how it comes to be seen. The vocabulary belongs most clearly to wayang, though the challenge is common to any inheritance of knowledge. All three are nouns for what an action leaves behind. In this pavilion, they are returned to their verbs. ikkibawiKrrr (established 2021, South Korea) and Aditya Novali (born 1978, Indonesia) meet across that turn, investigating how forms of wisdom survive, who holds authority over them, and what they become when released. Nuntun is teaching by accompaniment rather than instruction, and only for as long as someone is doing it. Nata is the arranging, and the authority that comes with it. Nonton is left to you.

Wisdom no longer held by a single keeper is not lost. It waits to be met by whoever arrives ready to receive it. This pavilion holds a door open for the length of a visit, so that we may still belong while everything else changes.

Nuntun
—to be led where return is possible

Knowledge holds its form once written down and waits to be retrieved. Wisdom behaves differently. How does what we know become something we live by? It is earned in the receiving and embodied in the doing, remade slightly by each relationship that carries it. In an era when there has never been more to know, or less time in which anything is allowed to reach us, the difficulty is no longer access but staying long enough. Time alone teaches nothing. Receptivity is cultivated only by returning to something and remaining with it, until wisdom registers and can be handed on, from one body to another.

Javanese has a verb for this kind of remaining: nuntun, to lead by the hand, an action that can be done neither at a distance nor alone. ikkibawiKrrr were on the receiving end of it before they were anything else. 

Nata
—to hold by means of letting go

Every piece of wisdom that reaches us arrives in an arrangement someone has put it in. Before it becomes a tool for moral and social instruction, whether spoken, sung, carved, or printed, it is given a sequence: one word before another, this part at the opening and that one withheld until the end.

Nata is the Javanese verb for that act: to hold things in relation, deciding what stays and what goes away. It is also a Javanese noun for king: to arrange is to hold authority over what is arranged. Aditya Novali has held that authority. From the age of seven he trained as a dalang cilik, a child puppet master in wayang, Indonesian shadow theatre; in 1989 he performed alone at the presidential palace before a formal state audience, commanding every movement on the screen and every character’s voice. He learned that position early and from the inside, observing how much narrative a single pair of hands can keep. He has not been a dalang for a long time.