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

>> Présenté par The Columns Gallery

Dans le cadre de la plateforme IRL {In Real Life}, The Columns Gallery présente un solo show de l’artiste Timoteus A. Kusno.

Timoteus A. Kusno (né en 1989) est un artiste conceptuel qui travaille sur différents medium : installations, dessins et films. Ses oeuvres évoquent autant les “invisibles” que le seuil entre la fantaisie et de l’histoire, des mémoires et des fictions. Par ses oeuvres, il crée des dialogues au sujet de l’incertitude et ce qui est considéré comme “inexistant”, ce qui rappelle fortement la puissance coloniale. Son travail est influencé par la tradition et l’histoire javanaise et il est fasciné par le pouvoir et l’idéologie de la foule.

“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