Spectre in the Celluloid: Timoteus Anggawan Kusno
Eye on Art: Spectre in the Celluloid: Timoteus Anggawan Kusno
Four short films by visual artist and filmmaker Timoteus Anggawan Kusno, a participant in Eye(s) Open, the exhibition in Eye. Kusno's work stretches across the liminal thresholds of fiction, history, imagination, and memory, interrogating the coloniality of power and the unseen.
Timoteus Anggawan Kusno critically examines editing and production structures, colonialism, history-making and its entanglements with power, ideology, and structured ignorance.
Kusno’s work has been presented internationally at major cultural institutions including Tate Modern (London) and the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam). In 2025, International Film Festival Rotterdam dedicated a focused program to his work. Since 2013, Kusno has been developing the Centre for Tanah Runcuk Studies, a fictional institution dedicated to experimental research into the (lost) region of Tanah Runcuk in the Dutch East Indies.The four films screening by Anggawan Kusno, who will also be present this evening, are thematically related to the exhibition Eye(s) Open – New Perspectives on Colonial Film Heritage.Programme
Anatomy of Nostalgia (2025, 8')
Weaving together archival materials from the Indonesian archipelago preserved in Eye Filmmuseum’s collection, Anatomy of Nostalgia disrupts colonial images originally produced as propaganda, transforming them into a disorienting stream of fragmented memories accompanied by specially composed music inspired by Jathilan trance dance traditions. By rendering history ambiguous, Kusno invites us to question what we see, opening up space for new interpretations and shifting meanings.
Sola Fata (2025, 22')
Structured around the nostalgic tones of kroncong music, Sola Fata forms a diptych with Silap Mata Bayang Berbalam (Obscura). In Sola Fata, the story follows a man in a white safari suit traversing a region unknown to him. As he attempts to make sense of his surroundings, the real world starts to permeate the film. The boundaries between cast and crew, documentary and fiction, and past and present begin to blur.
Dear Shadow, My Old Friend (2023, 13')
This film unfolds like a dream, combining archival footage with Super 8mm film shot by the director. A voice recalls encounters with shadows in a dark room; visions that gradually give way to deeper reflections on inherited memory, tracing the quiet presence of ancestors and the stories they carried. Intimate and elliptical, the work blurs the boundary between personal and collective memory, offering a poetic meditation on displacement, history, and the echoes that persist.
Afterlives (2024, 22')
By reusing excerpts and recycling archival materials from his earlier films, Kusno unsettles the meanings and images he once established, turning them into open signifiers that generate new associations as the film shifts between a Javanese war game involving spirits and bamboo horses and an abandoned sugar factory where portraits of Dutch East Indies governors once hung; through artistic interventions at the Rijksmuseum, the work further traces the afterlives of these colonial frames and questions how historical images continue to shape perception in the present.
Q&A
Followed by a Q&A between Timoteus Anggawan Kusno and curator, researcher and author Astrid Korporaal.
This is part of
Details
Production year
2026
Length
99 min.
Event language
English
Country
NL
Part of
Eye on Art
Eye on Art is a programme on the intersection between film and other arts. Eye on Art keeps up with current events, with presentations on contemporary artists and programmes that coincide with important exhibitions, manifestations and Eye activities.
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