Timoteus Kusno 

In his artistic practice, Timoteus Anggawan Kusno interrogates the colonial historiographies of the Netherlands and Indonesia, examining how historical knowledge is produced and sustained through regimes of power, ideology, and structured ignorance. Working with archival and museum collections, he approaches institutional holdings not as neutral repositories but as active agents in shaping historical narratives.

In Luka dan bisa kubawa berlari (2021), Kusno reconfigured materials from the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam by presenting empty frames of Dutch East Indies Governor General portraits alongside flags of Indonesian independence fighters. This displacement foregrounds absence, erasure, and symbolic hierarchy, prompting reflection on how museums mediate historical memory and authority. Across his installations and films, the materials he engages actively shape the formal structure and narrative logic of his works, disrupting entrenched hierarchies within historiography.

Responding to practices of collecting and classification, including the display of taxidermied animals in the Missiemuseum, Kusno examines the epistemological impulses behind knowledge production as technologies of power. This inquiry culminates in a moving image work presented across installation and cinematic formats, following a weary explorer in the tropics whose attempt to document an unfamiliar world collapses into a staged dream haunted by colonial power, memory, and the gaze of representation.

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