Connecting people through art 

In collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Taipei, we are delighted to present the solo exhibition of the Indonesian artist Timoteus Anggawan Kusno – Phantoms, which will be on view from February 24th to April 21st, 2024.

Combining a poetic and unique approach to filming with the traditional “jathilan dance” in Indonesia, the artist’s work tells a visual narrative interwoven with history, fiction and memories, and reveals a palpitating pursuit of the unspoken traumas and memories buried under the tumultuous past of Indonesia.

This exhibition is the result of Kusno winning the Han Nefkens Foundation – Loop Barcelona Video Art Production Grant 2021, in collaboration with the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, supported by the MoCA Taipei; the Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing; ILHAM Gallery, Kuala Lumpur; Centre d'Art Contemporain, Genève; and Art Hub Copenhagen.

Two video works, Reversal and Terra Incognita, from the Phantomsseries are on view in the exhibition. Both moving image works are under the same Indonesian title: “Luka dan Bisa Kubawa Berlari (Wounds and Venom I Carry as I am Running),” which marks the artist’s attempt to break free from a nostalgia for the colonial past and conduct this long-term research project to reconstruct history through the open and diverse aspects of artistic creation.

In this series, Kusno collaborates with the jathilan dancer community in Yogyakarta. Using props made of bamboo in the shape of horses, the dancers gradually enter a state of trance during the ritualistic dance, producing amazing bodily movements and a range of sounds while freely communicating with ancestral spirits. The dance symbolizes a connection with past culture, and on some occasions, the dancers are believed to embody the visions of the future in temporary moments.

Reversal was made in locations associated with the sugar industry during the colonial period. The dancers’ performance takes place in a sugar cane plantation, an abandoned sugar factory, and a former villa of the Dutch elites who controlled the local sugar industries in the past. Through this work, the lasting effects of the developmental history of the sugar industry on local society and cultural life gradually manifest themselves.

Terra Incognita was shot on a railway built during the Dutch colonial period in Indonesia. The local landscape from the train seems to represent the colonial gaze on the colony. The artist also incorporates archival images of the Dutch colonization, Japanese political propaganda, and past totalitarian regimes into the video, while re-enacting an interview session with a fictional, anonymous persecutor. As totalitarianism keeps being reproduced and returning on this land, the wounds and traumas from the oppressive history still subtly haunt the Indonesian contemporary life.