Riar Rizaldi

Biography
Riar Rizaldi (b. 1990) is an Indonesian artist and filmmaker based in Depok. His practice explores the relationships between science, technology, labour, and nature, alongside competing worldviews, genre cinema, and the possibilities of theoretical fiction. His work has been presented internationally at film festivals including Berlinale, Locarno Film Festival, IFFR, and Cinéma du Réel, as well as at the Whitney Biennial in New York, Taipei Biennial, Istanbul Biennial, Venice Architecture Biennale, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and Museum of Modern Art in New York. Recent solo exhibitions and focus programmes have been presented at Museum MACAN in Jakarta, Almanac in Turin, Gasworks and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Z33 in Hasselt, and Centre de la Photographie Genève.

Residency project
At La Becque, Riar Rizaldi will develop Mirage: Eden, the fourth episode in the Mirage series, initiated in 2023. Set in the distant future, near the end of the universe, the video work follows a stranded mecha inhabited by the last surviving human, whose body has become biologically droid-like and fused with the machine itself. Inspired by a fifteenth-century tropical Sufi mystic philosopher who imagined God as residing within the atom, this final human attempts to encode poetry into the proton, so that the poem might survive even the end of the universe.