Timoteus Anggawan Kusno is a multi-disciplinary artist, researcher, and filmmaker whose practice encompasses installations, drawings, moving images, and institutional projects. His work critically examines the intersections of fiction and history, imagination and memory, as well as the enduring legacies of colonialism and authoritarian power. By employing a meta-fictional approach, Kusno interrogates the mechanisms of historical narrative construction, reflecting on the role of media, the significance of editing, and the underlying structures of production. Through this lens, he investigates how historical narratives are shaped by power, ideology, and systems of ignorance.

Kusno's work has been exhibited and programmed by leading international cultural institutions and biennales, including TATE Modern (London), the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam), Fundació Joan Miró (Barcelona), the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA, Seoul), the Mumbai City Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA, Taipei), Kunstmuseum Bonn, the Center for Fine Art Brussels, and the Gwangju Biennale. His films have premiered at major international film festivals such as the Berlinale, the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), Dok.Leipzig, and CPH:DOX.

His contributions to contemporary art and film have been recognized through several prestigious awards and fellowships. In 2021, he received the Video Production Award from the Han Nefkens Foundation – Loop Barcelona. He was subsequently awarded the VISIO Production Fund (2023) and supported by the Locarno Residency in 2024. In 2025, the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) dedicated a focused program to his films.

Beyond his artistic and cinematic practice, Kusno has been developing the Centre for Tanah Runcuk Studies since 2013—an experimental art project structured as a fictional institution that examines the imaginary reconstruction of a lost territory in the Dutch East Indies. This project exemplifies his broader intellectual engagement with historiographical critique and the intersections of art, fiction, and power.

He currently lives and works between Amsterdam (Netherlands) and Yogyakarta (Indonesia).

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.