Timoteus Anggawan Kusno’s Phantoms Trilogy at Tate Modern—how memory becomes art
Misryoum Culture News looks at Timoteus Anggawan Kusno’s Phantoms Trilogy, where fiction and history collide to interrogate colonial power through moving images and installations.
At Tate Modern, Timoteus Anggawan Kusno’s Phantoms Trilogy invites viewers to watch history shift shape—half story, half trace.
Kusno is a visual artist and filmmaker whose practice moves across installations, drawings, and moving images.. Across these formats. he has developed a signature method: treating fiction not as escape. but as a lens for reading how memory works. how fantasy lingers. and how the past refuses to stay past.. His themes—interrogating the coloniality of power and the spectres that continue to haunt contemporary life—sit at the center of the trilogy’s atmosphere. where time feels elastic and meaning is assembled rather than received.
That formal restlessness matters.. In Kusno’s work, “history” is not a fixed record; it’s a contested field of fragments, gaps, and silences.. The films and visual components create a kind of cultural afterimage. encouraging audiences to notice what’s missing as much as what’s present.. Rather than asking viewers to simply recognize colonial narratives. the trilogy pushes them to ask who benefits from the version that survives. and who is left to haunt the margins.
Why Kusno’s “fiction-history” approach hits now
Kusno’s ability to braid fiction and history lands with particular force in a moment when cultural institutions are under pressure to rethink whose stories they stage—and how.. The trilogy’s focus on colonial power is not framed as distant critique; it’s staged as an ongoing condition. visible in the way archives are built. in which voices are preserved. and in how institutional memory is curated.. In that sense, the work feels less like a retrospective of empire and more like a diagnostic of the present.
His career trajectory also signals how contemporary art has become a connective tissue across regions.. Kusno lives and works between Amsterdam and Yogyakarta. and his practice has been exhibited and programmed internationally at institutions and biennales including the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona. Seoul’s MMCA. Taipei’s MoCA. and major platforms such as the Gwangju Biennale.. The effect is twofold: the work travels. yes. but it also carries its concerns across contexts—inviting audiences to confront familiar institutional languages with unfamiliar genealogies of knowledge.
The curatorial lens: Annie Jael Kwan’s emphasis on archives and solidarity
Presented with the curatorial framework of Annie Jael Kwan, the exhibition context brings another layer to the encounter.. Kwan is an independent curator and the 2025 Brent Biennial curator. working at the intersection of contemporary art. cultural and pedagogical activism.. Her exhibition-making and programming approach is rooted in an interest in archives. feminist. queer. and alternative histories. as well as collective practice and solidarity.
That matters because art that deals with spectres and memory can easily slip into abstraction.. Kwan’s curatorial attention—especially to archives and alternative histories—suggests an invitation to treat the exhibition not only as an aesthetic experience. but as a learning space.. In practice. that means viewers are encouraged to see how “history” is mediated: through what is kept. what is edited. and what is allowed to speak.
One of the most compelling tensions in works like the Phantoms Trilogy is how they operate on two levels at once.. On the surface, they offer images, rhythms, and formal strategies that pull you in.. Underneath. they train you to read cultural storytelling itself—how power shapes narrative structure. and how the residue of colonial rule can become normalized through everyday representation.
Kusno’s work, spanning moving images and installation environments, aligns with this double movement.. The films can feel like they’re constructing scenes from memory’s materials—dream logic, historical echo, and imaginative reconstruction.. The drawings and spatial elements then slow the encounter down, letting viewers linger with the texture of interpretation.. The trilogy becomes a reminder that cultural identity is not only inherited; it’s performed, contested, and revised.
What the Phantoms Trilogy suggests for the future of museum storytelling
Museums and biennales have increasingly become arenas where debates about decolonization, representation, and knowledge systems are staged publicly.. Kusno’s trilogy resonates because it doesn’t treat these debates as slogans; it turns them into atmosphere and method.. By confronting coloniality as something that endures—“spectres” rather than finished chapters—the work hints at how cultural institutions may need to change not just what they display. but how they structure meaning.
Looking ahead. the impact of exhibitions like this may be measured in subtle ways: the questions audiences carry with them; the pedagogical conversations that follow; and the growing expectation that alternative histories should not be treated as supplementary content.. Misryoum’s cultural reading of this moment is that contemporary art is increasingly functioning like a living archive—one that can hold contradictions. unsettle certainty. and make room for collective interpretation.
When you leave Tate Modern after experiences shaped by Kusno’s fiction-history method and Kwan’s archive-forward curatorial sensibility. the lingering feeling is not simply discomfort.. It’s clarity about how power operates through representation—and an insistence that culture can be rebuilt from the traces we thought were only haunting.