Indonesian artist and filmmaker Riar Rizaldi explores the relationship between science, fiction, and technology.
Following a residency at Gasworks at the beginning of the year, Riar has developed new work based on a dialogue between contemporary particle physics and ideas about the nature of God in tropical Sufi mysticism, a movement that thrived in the 15th-Century philosophical sphere of the Indo-Malay archipelago.
His Gasworks exhibition, Mirage, presents the first and second chapter of a ten-year project exploring how modern science and advanced technology effect the lives of humans and non-humans in Southeast Asia.
The newly commissioned film, Mirage – Eigenstate (2024), weaves together analogous investigations into the nature of reality, positioning Western science as just one methodology among many in a constellation of pluralistic worldviews. The film explores different interpretations of reality, from Sufi mysticism and Monorealism to theories of quantum mechanics.
Edited in the style of American astronomer and planetary scientist Carl Sagan’s 1980s television show, Cosmos, which sought to explain the origin of life and the fourth spatial dimension, Mirage – Eigenstate references scientific mass communication, where complex concepts are described in straightforward ways, often through images.
The exhibition also includes the first film in the series, Mirage – Metanoia (Prelude) (2023), which uses 1970s Hanna-Barbera style animation to stage a conversation between two cosmologists about the presence of God in atoms.