Museum MACAN invites new media artist and filmmaker Riar Rizaldi to share his artistic practice that explores the intersection of technology, colonial histories, and extractive industrial landscapes across Southeast Asia.
Following an international career that has taken his work to MoMA New York, Centre Pompidou Paris, the Venice Architecture Biennale, and major film festivals including the Berlinale, Locarno, Viennale, and BFI London, 2026 marks a new milestone in Riar Rizaldi’s artistry through his first solo exhibition in Indonesia. The project unfolds as a tripartite presentation across three cultural institutions that begins with Period Piece at Museum MACAN.
Period Piece is centered on Bioskop Asymptotic (2026), which draws on the artist’s own memories of Pasundan Theatre in Bandung, the cinema where he first encountered the moving image as a child in the 1990s. The work reimagines its lobby as a space where time has come to a sudden, speculative halt.
The installation is presented alongside two video works: Fanfictie: Volcanology (2025), which explores the encounter between the nineteenth-century Dutch colonial science and Javanese cosmology through the figure of geologist Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn; and Tropenkolder (2026), which revisits archival phantom-ride film shot from trains across the Dutch East Indies to examine cinema, labour, and the 1923 railways workers’ strike. Together, the three works trace how the past is embedded within technological and industrial systems, and how it continues to resurface in unexpected forms
Program Details
Saturday, 13 June 2026 02.00 – 03.00 PM (WIB) Museum MACAN
This conversation will be led by Venus Lau, director of Museum MACAN and delivered in English. This session is accessible to the public with a valid museum entry ticket.
