Period Piece: Riar Rizaldi on Cinema and Future Nostalgia

There used to be a cinema in the Kopo area of Bandung called Pasundan Theatre. It screened B-movies, and Riar Rizaldi grew up around that space. From his memories of the theater emerged Period Piece, his first museum exhibition in Indonesia.

When asked about the work, Riar is quick to distance himself from autobiographical labels. “In this project, I deliberately avoided autobiography, autoethnography, and similar approaches. For me, the cinema is not merely a site of personal nostalgia, but a place that produces collective memory,” he says. What interests him is not his own recollection of the Kopo theater, but what such spaces represented before they disappeared from urban life: social venues where people encountered moving images, long before television and later smartphones gradually took over that role.

Presented at Museum MACAN, Period Piece unfolds through three works, each situated in a different historical period yet connected by a larger question: how ideas of progress always arrive alongside something else, something that rarely appears in official narratives.

Fanfictie: Volcanology (2025) is set in the nineteenth century and explores the encounter between Dutch colonial volcanology and Javanese cosmology. Tropenkolder (2026), commissioned by the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, examines phantom ride films alongside the railway workers’ strike of 1923. Bioskop Asymptotic (2026), a new commission for Museum MACAN, reimagines the lobby of an Indonesian cinema from the 1990s as a space where time seems suspended.

Riar describes these works with a single phrase: “future nostalgia.” It is a longing for a world that once promised progress, collective experiences, and a better life, yet never quite arrived.

Why cinema? Why use it as the entry point?

For Riar, the answer is rooted in a broader understanding of technology. He explains that technological advancement as a pursuit of efficiency has almost always emerged from military interests. Cinema, however, occupies a different trajectory.

“It’s important for me to talk about technology through the lens of cinema because, to me, it represents a kind of non-militaristic technological origin,” he says. The screen technologies of the twenty-first century can be traced back to the history of cinema itself, and the movie theater was one of the first places where that technology met a social public on a large scale.

Yet the history of cinema has never been neutral. Riar points to the colonial context in very specific terms. In Tropenkolder, he returns to 1923 and to film footage shot by Dutch filmmakers using cameras mounted on trains. These images present the landscapes of the Dutch East Indies in carefully composed frames. Outside those frames, however, along the railway tracks, were laborers at work and in the midst of organizing strikes. “It shows how the history of cinema has never been neutral. Even today,” Riar says.

He also draws a comparison between cinema and wayang. Both rely on screens and light, whether generated by lamps or fire. Yet there is a fundamental difference. Celluloid records reality through an indexical chemical process, while wayang operates more like television, containing a dimension of liveness rather than memory.

Riar does not make this comparison to romanticize wayang as something “authentic” and cinema as “foreign.” Instead, he uses it to demonstrate that traditions of moving-image mediation through screens existed long before cinema arrived through colonialism. Through this comparison, his effort to question the logic of modern cinema, shaped by Western approaches to science and technology, becomes more apparent.

In Fanfictie: Volcanology (2025), Riar explores the encounter between nineteenth-century Dutch colonial science and local cosmological understandings of volcanoes. The work centers on Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn, the Dutch geologist and naturalist whose writings exemplify both the meeting point and the friction between colonial science and local spiritual and philosophical interpretations of nature. The installation also features reclaimed wooden cinema seats that Riar discovered in a local theater in Padang, alongside two wayang gunungan positioned behind them.

Bioskop Asymptotic is the work most directly concerned with memory and space. Like many of his installations that emerge from film-set architecture, it reconstructs a cinema lobby from the 1990s. Yet Riar resists describing it as a nostalgic reconstruction. “I’ve always felt that spaces built for films function like liminal spaces. They exist and do not exist at the same time. They have a physical presence, but they are not quite the experience of space they are meant to represent.”

The term “liminal” is borrowed from Marc Augé’s concept of the non-place, which describes the strange sensation of occupying functional spaces that lack historical ties, social relationships, or cultural identity. The reconstructed cinema lobby operates as a non-place on two levels. It is a replica of a space that no longer exists, and it stands within a gallery, a context entirely different from its original function.

What interests Riar about nostalgia, and he emphasizes this clearly, is not the nationalist or political nostalgia that has become increasingly visible around the world. “I’m interested in a more reflective form of nostalgia. There are moments when you feel a connection to a particular historical period, while at the same time having no desire for that period to return. It leaves behind a strange sensory feeling.”

Riar Rizaldi is an artist and filmmaker whose work has been presented at MoMA New York, Centre Pompidou Paris, the Venice Architecture Biennale, Berlinale, Locarno, IFFR, and BFI London. At its core, Period Piece is an attempt to question how Indonesia has received and processed modernity from elsewhere. This time, that question is being posed on home ground.