How We Appear and How We Are Felt: in conversation with Dr Khairani Barokka about 'Annah, Infinite'

Abstract

A reading and discussion of Annah, Infinite, an experimental work of creative non-fiction that challenges art history, confronts colonial ableism, and reclaims a stolen spirit.

This is an escape story.  In Annah, Infinite, the dominant narratives surrounding Paul Gauguin’s famous painting Annah la Javanaise (1893-94) are turned upside down. The book argues a simple point: what if the portrait is not one of a consenting muse, but a child in pain?

Annah, Infinite questions the colonial power that has defined the infamous subject’s unknown history. Through the mythology of Annah, Okka draws attention to the systems of ablenormativity, racism, and sexism that shape what we learn of art history and what we see on museum walls.

Alongside her critique, the author engages with Annah la Javanaise through poetry, fiction, and visual art. A work of emotional heft, Okka asks us to acknowledge the possibility of pain in every single portrait, as well as the possibility of escape.

Speaker

Khairani Barokka is a writer, artist and editor from Jakarta, based in London. Okka’s work has been presented widely internationally, and centres disability justice as anticolonial praxis, access as translation and environmental justice. She has been a UNFPA Indonesian Young Leader Driving Social Change, a Delfina Foundation Associate Artist, Associate Artist at the UK’s National Centre for Writing, Editor of Modern Poetry in Translation, an Artforum Must-See, and a shortlistee for the 2023 Asian Women of Achievement Awards. She has a PhD by practice in visual cultures from Goldsmiths, focused on disability, visuality and ableist colonial legacies through the lens of Gauguin’s painting Annah la Javanaise.

Okka’s most recent exhibition was ACE-funded Kerokan Pol, part of the duo exhibition Languages of Intimacy (with Bella Milroy) at Birmingham School of Art’s Gallery in 2024, curated by Grand Union. It is a collection of four short films shot in Jakarta, on sick-disabled intimacies drawing from Indigeneities, against a backdrop of hypercapitalism. Her latest books are 2021’s Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches, shortlisted for the Barbellion Prize), 2024’s amuk (Nine Arches, longlisted for the Jhalak Poetry Prize), and her 2025 speculative nonfiction debut, Annah, Infinite (Tilted Axis), an Expert Pick in the Bookseller.

Image: Khairani Barokka, Annah #67, Greyscale: A giant, purple hand holds an eraser to a black and white abstract outline of a feminine body on a chair, with a monkey at their feet. Purwapada in Javanese script covers the face of the figure, and the background is a hazy, black and white textured image. This digital image is part of the performance installation Annah: Nomenclature, as well as corresponding to a prose piece of the same name in the book Annah, Infinite.