
Timoteus Anggawan Kusno, Asset Object Related to “After Colossus,” 2024, machine-learning-trained generated images and archival images on 35-mm film, acrylic, each 1 7⁄8 × 1 7⁄8″.
In Timoteus’s recent exhibition “Fever Dream” at Kohesi Initiatives, Jogja, viewers encountered a cornucopia of objects, from ominous, blurry charcoal drawings of dictators and colonial figures to large-scale installations full of film props and colonial-era photos of Java, winding through the two floors of Kohesi’s mazelike architecture. Timoteus’s artworks formed a cabinet of curiosities in which each fragment had been excavated from the artist’s historical cache. In one room hung Dismantling Nostalgia, 2024, a ceiling-high, full-body portrait of Johannes van Heutsz—former governor-general of the Dutch East Indies and the most prominent symbol of colonial legacy in Indonesian art history—collaged from canvas shreds of contemporary Mooi Indie paintings (a genre with roots in Dutch colonial-era landscapes) collected by the artist. Archival film reels captured slices of the sugarcane industry in Java, first established by the Dutch and continuing under Suharto’s regime, coalescing into a kaleidoscopic and vertiginous rereading of the colonial past and an interrogation of historical specters.
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