Fever Dream
June 30 - August 24, 2024
Timoteus Anggawan Kusno
Tirtodipuran Link Building A
Jl. Tirtodipuran 50,
Yogyakarta, Indonesia 55143
Having been exploring colonialism-related issues and speculative history for a decade, Kusno unfolds much wider discourses related to collective memory and power relation, particularly the ones referring to Indonesia during the New Order regime and after the regime falls, to discuss different variations of interpretations, from historical amnesia, nostalgia, and melancholia. The current exhibition is presented as a development of a film set. It is designed by imagining how one scene conjoins with the others, with a well-directed dramaturgy. All aim to obtain filmic sensations by portraying historical data and dissonance to create a narrative that is, instead of whole, scattered in fragments. The cinematographic-like approach suggests Kusno's working method, which largely involves gathering visual images from many different sources—mostly from historical references—and processing them with varied techniques, styles, and mediums.
The exhibition concludes with a video installation titled Fever Dream. Kusno put the realities of the colonial era and the following periods in parallel with dreams and subconsciousness. A fever dream is a metaphor for entering a fatal subconsciousness, an alley connecting the real world and the imaginary. A house on fire is leading us to a bigger catastrophe—represented by an explosion that splits the sky open (this seems to refer to the Mount Tambora and Mount Krakatau explosions)—to a wound from the past that consistently called us out. Is our present a déjà vu?
In this exhibition, the historical narratives and presentations we are looking at still somehow have the characteristics of a monument or tend to be another monument. But that is how it is; the thing we challenge against or would like to destroy, oftentimes, never truly leaves us: it stays and grows.