Indonesian new-media artist and filmmaker Riar Rizaldi will present Period Piece, his first museum exhibition in Indonesia, 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. He is known for his practice at the intersection of technology, colonial histories, and extractive industrial landscapes across Southeast Asia.

Period Piece centres on Bioskop Akhir Zaman (2026), a newly commissioned installation created for Museum MACAN. Drawing 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.

It 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), originally commissioned by Eyefilmmuseum Amsterdam, 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.