Timoteus A. Kusno, Others or 'Rust en Orde', 2017, Video. Courtesy of the artist and The Columns Gallery.

Timoteus A. Kusno, Others or 'Rust en Orde', 2017, Video. Courtesy of the artist and The Columns Gallery.

Timoteus A. Kusno

>> Presented by The Columns Gallery - Booth U 15

For IRL {In Real Life} Platform, The Columns Gallery features a solo show of Indonesian artist Timoteus A. Kusno.

Timoteus A. Kusno (b. 1989) is a conceptual artist who works with various mediums, including installations, drawings and film. His works deal with ‘the invisibles’, as well as the liminality between fantasy and history, memories and fictions. Through his works, he creates dialogues about the uncertain and that which is considered to ‘not exist’, something that strongly relates to colonial power. His work is influenced by the Javanese tradition and history and he is fascinated with the power and ideology of the crowd. 

“The idea underlying this new work emerged during my observation of the tradition of Rampog Macan or Tiger Raid. This 'lost ceremony' is believed to have begun in the mid-to-late 18th century, ( … ) a violent, bloody collective ritual organized by the King and performed once a year on some religious occasions, ( … ) people would gather under the hot tropical sun, in the palace square, to see Javanese tigers being pitted against buffaloes, bulls, or in a much older time a suspected criminal. They would fight to death on the "stage". The king would also invite high-level colonial officials to sit with him; this was done for the sake of demonstrating his power.

( … ) I manipulated and intervened in the archives by transforming the tiger as the subject of the death into a tiger-stealth or a man-tiger instead. This is a reflection on the history of the extermination of "witches" in Europe several centuries ago, whose cases 'strangely'---after the fall of the Suharto dictatorship around 1998--- escalated in the form of frequent occurrences in some parts of Java in which a suspected witch/ shaman (or even a local religious leader) would die 'mysteriously', which in some violent cases involved ‘the crowd.’”

— by Timoteus A. Kusno