Sumatra, Jawa, Kalimantan (Gazes from the Colony)

Sumatra, Jawa, Kalimantan (Gazes from the Colony) is a 10-minute experimental art installation film by Indonesian artist Afrian Purnama, released April 3, 2026 in the Netherlands as part of the Eye Filmmuseum's exhibition engaging with its colonial archive. The work assembles amateur footage recorded on three Indonesian islands during the period of Dutch colonial rule. Each island is given its own distinct visual register: footage from Java foregrounds domestic routines and leisure activities, reflecting the everyday social life of the colonial class, while footage from Sumatra and Kalimantan is dominated by plantation operations and scenes of natural resource extraction, exposing the economic machinery underlying colonial occupation. The film situates these amateur images within a broader argument about the colonial archive as a site of class division and racial hierarchy — not neutral records of private life but documents of how colonial power saturated daily existence. The installation adds an interactive dimension: as visitors approach the projection screens, their bodies cast shadows that interrupt the film image, physically implicating the audience in the act of looking and prompting reflection on their own relationship to the colonial gaze. The work was created as part of a group exhibition at Eye Filmmuseum in which eleven artists intervened in, reframed, and destabilized inherited colonial visual regimes drawn from the museum's holdings of footage from formerly Dutch-occupied Indonesia and Suriname. No conventional narrative arc is present; the film operates as essayistic montage and spatial installation.

Sources: TMDb, Numéro Netherlands (search snippet), WebSearch result snippet referencing Eye Filmmuseum exhibition context