In this week's episode of Between Nasi Goreng and Fried Rice I was delighted to talk to the multi-hyphenate and award winning artist and author Khairani Barokka. We discussed how she first came to the UK, her book, Annah, Infinite, published by Tilted Axis Press in September and why she wrote it.
Okka's new book is an experimental work of creative non-fiction that challenges art history, confronts colonial ableism, and reclaims a stolen spirit
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Okka is a writer, artist, arts consultant, translator and editor from Jakarta. Her work has been presented widely internationally, and centres disability justice as anticolonial praxis, environmental justice, and access as translation.
She regularly teaches, mentors, and consults for arts organisations, and has a PhD by Practice in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London.
Among her many honours, she has been a UNFPA Indonesian Young Leader Driving Social Change, a Delfina Foundation Associate Artist, an Artforum Must-See, and Associate Artist at the UK’s National Centre for Writing.
She was the first Poet-in-Residence at Modern Poetry in Translation, and later became the magazine’s first non-British Editor. In 2023, Okka was shortlisted for the Asian Women of Achievement Awards in the Arts and Culture Category.
Her books include Indigenous Species (Tilted Axis), Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches, as co-editor), Rope (Nine Arches),Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches), shortlisted for the 2022 Barbellion Prize, and 2024’s amuk (Nine Arches), longlisted for the Jhalak Prize.
‘Annah, Infinite is a luminous act of reclamation. It’s a text that dares to ask what lies behind a portrait, what stories are silenced when history paints over the living.
Disability activist and author Alice Wong calls it “a fascinating exploration” of how pain is written on Annah’s body and how Barokka refuses to look away. Bhanu Kapil sees it as a work staged “at the limit of portraiture,” metabolising the body into presence and absence. Anton Hur describes it as “so precise and empathetic that the reader aches with phantom pain.” And Daisy Rockwell reminds us that it heralds “the birth of a new, yet-to-be-named genre.”
‘A profoundly disturbing, intriguing, and illuminating work—Khairani Barokka is so precise and empathetic that the reader aches with phantom pain.’ — Anton Hur, author of Toward Eternity and 2025 International Booker Prize judge.
‘Through this study of a single canvas and its subject, Barokka presents a brilliant book that defies classification, one that delves into linguistics, colonial history, queer theory and memoir, and is by turns lyrical, angry, tender and pained, harking back to the pioneering work of Linda Nochlin and John Berger, but blazing a new trail that is as unexpected as it is enthralling.’
— Frank Wynne, The Irish Times
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