Timoteus Anggawan Kusno is an artist, researcher, and filmmaker whose practice spans moving image, installation, drawing, and experimental institutional forms. Working at the intersections of art, cinema, and historical inquiry, his research examines the unstable relations between fiction and history, imagination and memory, with particular attention to the enduring effects of colonialism and institutionalised forms of power.

Through meta-fiction, archival research, and speculative methods, Kusno investigates how histories are constructed, circulated, edited, and granted authority. His work considers the mediating role of images and narratives, as well as the material and institutional conditions through which certain histories become visible and legible while others are displaced, obscured, or forgotten. Across his artistic and cinematic practice, he is particularly interested in the ways memory, territory, and political imaginaries are produced and contested.

Kusno’s work has been exhibited and presented internationally at museums, cultural institutions, biennales, and film festivals, including Tate Modern, London; the Rijksmuseum and Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Seoul; Mumbai City Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Taipei; Kunstmuseum Bonn; the Centre for Fine Arts Brussels; and the Gwangju Biennale. His films have also been presented at the Berlinale, Locarno, International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), DOK Leipzig, and CPH:DOX.

His work has received a number of international awards, commissions, and fellowships. In 2021, he received the Video Production Award from the Han Nefkens Foundation and LOOP Barcelona, followed by the VISIO Production Fund in 2023 and participation in the Locarno Residency in 2024. In 2025, the International Film Festival Rotterdam presented a focused programme dedicated to his films.

Since 2013, Kusno has developed the Centre for Tanah Runcuk Studies, a long-term artistic research project conceived through the form of a fictional institution. Centred on the speculative reconstruction of a purportedly lost territory in the former Dutch East Indies, the project brings archival inquiry into dialogue with fiction, rumour, and historical uncertainty. Through this ongoing project, Kusno examines how territories, collective memories, and historical knowledge are produced, administered, and sustained, as well as the institutional structures through which they acquire legitimacy.

He lives and works between Amsterdam, the 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.