Frieze Seoul 2025

kohesi Initiatives is delighted to announce that its presentation of Timoteus Anggawan Kusno in the Focus Asia section of Frieze Seoul 2025 has been awarded the FOCUS ASIA STAND PRIZE. This marks the gallery’s debut at the fair, with its presentation on view at Booth F10. Frieze Seoul takes place from 3–6 September 2025.

Focus Asia is a section dedicated to solo presentations by galleries established in or after 2013 and based in Asia. For the 2025 edition, the jury comprises Alex Jen, Hyo Gyoung Jeon, and Jae Seok Kim. Focus Asia is presented in collaboration with Stone Island, who provide subsidies that help enable young galleries’ participation in the fair, alongside Frieze’s existing support.

kohesi Initiatives and Timoteus Anggawan Kusno are the recipients of the third iteration of this award, joining previous winners: Tokyo-based gallery Parcel with Chinese artist Lu Yang (2024), and Seoul-based gallery CYLINDER with South Korean artist Sinae Yoo (2023).

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Timoteus Anggawan Kusno’s presentation probes the fault lines between memory, myth, and manufactured history by using the language of cinema to explore how absence itself can become a narrative force. Set against the backdrop of Indonesia’s turbulent 1960s, a time marked by political rupture, mass censorship, and the violent reordering of cultural memory, the project imagines a fi lm titled Djoeroes Kramat that may never have been released, or maybe never have existed, yet echoes through rumour, gesture, and inherited nostalgia. In doing so, it confronts the historical reality that many cultural artefacts were banned, disappeared, or deliberately erased during the transition from Soekarno’s Old Order to Soeharto’s New Order. By evoking a “lost” martial arts fi lm from this era (Djoeroes Kramat), this meta-narrative experimentation offers a speculative lens through which we can refl ect on the fi lms (and stories) that never made it into the official archives.

This project has never aimed to reconstruct a specifi c fi lm; instead, it inhabits the space of its supposed absence. It explores how collective memory is shaped not only by what is remembered but also by what is rumoured, repressed, or imagined into being. The formal approach, blending reenactments, speculative fragments, and stylised reconstruction, foregrounds the instability of truth within the cinematic medium itself. At its core, Djoeroes Kramat poses a deceptively simple question: What happens when we begin to remember something that never existed? In doing so, it speaks to broader questions of state power, cultural erasure, and the fragile line between fi ction and history, not just in Indonesia, but in any context where memory is engineered, suppressed, or distorted.