Timoteus Anggawan Kusno is a multi-disciplinary artist, researcher, and filmmaker who presents his works through installations, drawings, moving images, and institutional projects. He navigates the boundary between fiction and history, imagination and memory, and addresses the lasting effects of colonialism and power through his narratives. Kusno uses a meta-fictional approach in his art, reflecting on the role of medium in narrative creation and critically examining the significance of editing and production structure. Through this approach, he questions the mechanisms of "history-making" and their relationship to power, ideology, and "ignorance."
Kusno's works have been featured in international cultural institutions and biennales, including the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) Seoul, the Mumbai City Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) Taipei, and the Biennale Jogja XIV Equator #4: Indonesia-Brazil. His works are part of the collections of the MMCA Seoul and MoCA Taipei. He received the Video Production Award from the Han Nefkens Foundation – Loop Barcelona in 2021.
In addition to his artistic practice, Kusno has been developing the Centre for Tanah Runcuk Studies since 2013, an experimental art project in the form of a fictional institution that explores a lost territory in the Dutch East Indies. He currently resides and works between Amsterdam and Yogyakarta.
CENTRE FOR TANAH RUNCUK STUDIES (CTRS) is a fictional study center initiated by artist Timoteus Anggawan Kusno. CTRS works collaboratively with curators, historians, ethnographers, fellow artists, and academia. This study center works interdisciplinary in order to construct the idea of “Tanah Runcuk”—as a ‘lost’ territory in Dutch East Indies—to draw questions on the coloniality of power and what is left unseen. This “model of text production” and narratology are also responding to the way history is (re)produced, read, and ‘taken’ in its relativity with certain power and regime.