Obscura

Overview

In this dual-channel installation, Timoteus Angawan Kusno explores nostalgia through trance, possession, and the strange familiarity of images and sound. Drawing trom the residual zeitgeist of colonial images and musical registers such as kroncong and Mooi Indië, or Beautiful Indies' (a style of imagery and cultural representation from the late 19th and early 20th centuries that portrayed the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia, as picturesque, peaceful, and exotic), Silap Mata Bayang Berbalam moves through sensations that feel both intimate and estranged. It asks: what does it mean to remember a memory that was never truly yours? How do images inhabit us, and how do we become possessed by what they leave?