Timoteus Anggawan Kusno

In the chaotic aftermath following the collapse of Indonesia’s dictatorship, a team of researchers discovers a forgotten archive revealing a covert operation that manipulated dreams and memories.

The powerful interventions of the Indonesian artist, cultural studies scholar and filmmaker Timoteus Anggawan Kusno are internationally renowned. What distinguishes them are the empowering attitude and the breathtaking aesthetics he employs to re-interpret in different media the cultural traditions passed on in his homeland. With “Afterlives”, he delivers another unequivocal reckoning with the representations of history shaped by colonial annexation.

In his hypnotic ‘Terra Incognita’, Timoteus Anggawan Kusno questions colonial power and heritage by stretching in the liminality of fiction, history, imagination and memory.

A young man sets out on a train journey along a railway route that was previously utilized for transporting sugar in colonial times. While taking a short nap, he encounters an unusual dance and visions from the past, drawing him further into his concealed ancestral memories. As he explores the deserted sugar industry in a dreamlike state, he confronts the spirits, wounds, and venom embodied in his motions.

Haunted by nostalgia for a place they never knew, gallery workers steal a Mooi Indië landscape painting and drive towards the sea.