Museum MACAN announces its first chapter of the 2026 program, featuring Riar Rizaldi, Dawn Ng, and Marcos Kueh and bringing together modern and contemporary works in a shared inquiry into how time, landscape, memory, and cultural identity are experienced and constructed. Across different media and practices, each presentation explores the intersection of geological, historical, and technological timescales, tracing how the forces that shaped the past continue to animate and complicate the present.
Indonesian new-media artist and filmmaker Riar Rizaldi will present Period Piece, which includes a new commission for Museum MACAN, making the artist’s first museum show in his homeland following his recognition on the international stage. Widely recognized for his practice at the intersection of technology, colonial histories, and extractive industrial landscapes across Southeast Asia, with work screened at MoMA New York, The Centre Pompidou Paris, the Venice Architecture Biennale, and International film festivals including the Berlinale, Locarno, Viennale, and BFI London. The exhibition traces overlooked histories embedded within technological and industrial systems, culminating in a site-responsive installation that reimagines the spatial and cultural memory of a 1990s Indonesian cinema.
Menelan Cakrawala (meaning “Swallow the Horizon” in English) opens with a provocation: the horizon, for all its appearance of neutrality, has never been innocent. Long treated as a boundary where land, sea, and sky meet, it is in fact a constructed field through which knowledge is produced, territories are imagined, and power is exercised. Bringing together modern and contemporary works— from Raden Saleh, Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn, Heinz Mack, and Robert Rauschenberg to Dede Eri Supria, I Nyoman Masriadi, Ipeh Nur, and Thảo Nguyên Phan — the exhibition examines how landscape is shaped across different regimes of vision.
From colonial image-making to contemporary reflections on resource use and ecological crisis, these works reveal landscape as an active field rather than a passive backdrop. To swallow the horizon, this exhibition suggests, is to finally recognize its layered construction, where representation, materiality, and power remain inseparable.
Singaporean multidisciplinary artist Dawn Ng presents Atlantis II, an ongoing body of work that began in 2024. Central to Ng’s practice is ice, the most ephemeral material available in the tropical climate of her native Singapore, which she uses to trace time’s passage from form to nothingness. Ng has been commissioned by the National Gallery Singapore, the Asian Civilisations Museum, and the Hermès Foundation, and her works are held in collections of major institutions across the globe, including the UBS Art Collection, National Gallery Singapore, Ueshima Museum, and Singapore Art Museum.
In the museum’s Sculpture Garden, Museum MACAN presents Kenyalang Circus, a solo presentation by Malaysian textile artist Marcos Kueh. Working at the intersection of vernacular textile traditions and contemporary visual culture, Kueh produces his tapestries through industrial digital weaving that replicates the sacred Bornean symbols, resulting in vivid works that critique how cultural heritage is staged, commodified, and consumed. Kueh’s works have been part of the collections of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Museum Voorlinden, and awards including the Ron Mandos Young Blood Award (2022).
For the Museum MACAN Children’s Art Space, the museum will feature Beradu Padu by Ruth Marbun. Expanding the idea of connectivity and the paradox of abundant information in our modern life, Marbun creates a breathing space to reclaim attention, to create, and to celebrate the stories that bring us together, inviting children and families into a site of deep reflection. Through tactile experiences using papers and everyday objects, young visitors can explore their curiosity, weave their own stories into modular installations, and embrace change happening within the space throughout the exhibition. A playful exploration of personal and collective experiences, Beradu Padu mirrors Marbun’s outlook on the resilience of ordinary things.
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