Museum MACAN Invites Us Into Shifting Landscapes

Under the theme Where Are We in Time: A Season Across Shifting Landscapes, Museum MACAN takes visitors through a multitude of landscapes and layers of time via a solo exhibition by Riar Rizaldi, the group exhibition Menelan Cakrawala, special presentations by Marcos Kueh and Dawn Ng, and the Museum MACAN Children’s Art Space project Beradu Padu by Ruth Marbun. Through distinct practices and mediums, these five presentations offer journeys across places marked by their own complexities, expanding our understanding of the many forces at play amid today’s rapid transformations.

Period Piece

Indonesian artist and filmmaker Riar Rizaldi presents his first museum exhibition in Indonesia following an international career that has brought his work to institutions and events including MoMA, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Venice Architecture Biennale; and major film festivals such as Berlinale, Locarno, IFFR, and BFI London.

Working at the intersection of technology, colonial history, and the landscapes of extractive industries, Rizaldi’s Period Piece examines how notions of progress in Indonesia have long been entangled with colonial labor systems and the exploitation of natural resources. The exhibition traces these connections from the emergence of volcanology in the nineteenth century, through the development of railways and cinema in the early twentieth century, to the constantly shifting experiences of screens and social spaces today.

At the center of the exhibition is Bioskop Asymptotic (2026), a newly commissioned installation for Museum MACAN that reimagines the lobby of a 1990s Indonesian cinema as a speculative space where time appears suspended. The work is presented alongside Fanfictie: Volcanology (2025), which explores the collision between Dutch colonial science and Javanese cosmology, as well as Tropenkolder (2026), commissioned by Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. Revisiting phantom ride films and the railway workers’ strike of 1923, Tropenkolder reflects on cinema, labor, and slowness as forms of resistance against acceleration.

Menelan Cakrawala

The group exhibition begins with a provocation: despite its seemingly neutral appearance, the horizon is far from simple. Long understood as the boundary where land, sea, and sky converge, the horizon is in fact a constructed field where knowledge is produced, territories are imagined, and power is exercised.

Featuring modern and contemporary works by Akiq A.W., Anselm Kiefer, Antoine A.J. Payen, Dede Eri Supria, Eddy Susanto, Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn, Heinz Mack, I Nyoman Masriadi, Ipeh Nur, Jan Daniel Beynon, Jean Dubuffet, Lang Jingshan, Moelyono, Raden Saleh, Robert Rauschenberg, S. Sudjojono, Thảo Nguyên Phan, Theaster Gates, Wakidi, and Zao Wou-Ki, the exhibition examines how landscapes are produced through visual culture across different regimes of seeing.

At its historical core lies the Mooi Indië idiom that flourished in colonial Indonesia between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These idyllic portrayals of the archipelago concealed the social and ecological realities of plantation economies and systems of forced labor.

Structured into four sections – Exploration and Disguise, The Sky as Infrastructure, Unruly Landscapes, and Contested Landscapes – the exhibition moves from colonial image-making practices to the present day, where beauty continues to function as a mode of concealment within algorithmic systems of surveillance, extraction, and ecological crisis. Across diverse mediums and temporal scales, the works question how the forces that shaped the past continue to animate and complicate the world we inhabit today.

Dawn Ng: Atlantis II

Singaporean multidisciplinary artist Dawn Ng presents an ongoing body of work that began in 2024. At the heart of Ng’s practice is ice – the most ephemeral material available in the tropical climate of her home city, Singapore – which she employs to record the passage of time from presence to disappearance.

The process is both simple and monumental: pigmented blocks of ice, each weighing up to 80 kilograms, are suspended above stacks of Chinese xuan paper. As the ice slowly melts, pigments seep through each layer, leaving behind liquid formations reminiscent of drifting nebulae or slowly dissolving archipelagos.

To date, more than 300 blocks have been assembled in the artist’s studio solely for self-destruction. Arranged sequentially, the resulting panels read like film strips or geological strata – what Ng describes as “time tapestries” – with each layer recording a different stage of dissolution.

Marcos Kueh: Kenyalang Circus

Presented in the Sculpture Garden, Kenyalang Circus is a solo project by Malaysian textile artist Marcos Kueh. Working at the intersection of vernacular textile traditions and contemporary visual culture, Kueh creates his tapestries through industrial digital weaving processes that reproduce sacred symbols from Borneo. The resulting works are vibrant and celebratory while simultaneously critiquing the ways cultural heritage is staged, commercialized, and consumed.

The exhibition highlights three bodies of work. The monumental installation Kenyalang Circus: Nenek Moyang (2023) translates the cosmology of Indigenous communities in Borneo – where waterfalls function as thresholds between the human world and the ancestral realm – into a flowing series of woven banners. The Woven Poster series investigates how cultural identities are shaped through tourism and the circulation of capital, while the Kerbau series explores animal symbolism as a lens through which to reflect on social hierarchy, labor, and power within Malaysian society.

Museum MACAN Children’s Art Space: Ruth Marbun – Beradu Padu

Museum MACAN Children’s Art Space presents Beradu Padu by Jakarta-based artist Ruth Marbun, whose practice explores the relationships between people, materials, and their environments. Responding to the paradox of contemporary life – where information is abundant yet meaningful connection feels increasingly elusive – the project creates a space for children and families to reclaim their attention, make things together, and celebrate stories that bring people closer to one another.

Through a practice Marbun calls “mass collage,” visitors are invited to assemble black-and-white printed images using colored tape and everyday objects, weaving their own narratives into an ever-evolving modular installation. Each personal creation is then connected to others using cable ties, gradually transforming the gallery into a living collective landscape that shifts and expands over the course of the exhibition.

Playful yet quietly reflective, Beradu Padu embodies Marbun’s enduring interest in the resilience of ordinary things and the bonds that emerge when individual stories are brought together into something larger than themselves. The installation accumulated throughout the project will later be developed by the artist into archival materials and future artworks.

Menelan Cakrawala is on view until 5 September 2026. Riar Rizaldi: Period Piece, the special presentations Marcos Kueh: Kenyalang Circus and Dawn Ng: Atlantis II, as well as the Museum MACAN Children’s Art Space presentation Ruth Marbun: Beradu Padu, will remain open to the public until 4 October 2026.