AFTERLIVES

The very first sequence establishes a bold tone: a scream is heard from off-screen, in which both pain and liberating relief from the same simultaneously manifest and become one. On-screen, an explosion of colour: Jathilan, a ritualistic war game from Java, is being performed. Men dance themselves into a trance astride woven-bamboo horses. In an impressive act of montage, the editing to the music of Setabuhan is so precise that the colonialist archival images reveal themselves for what they truly are – and fade away. The focus shifts to those (dance) performances which symbolically reanimate the Javanese tiger so often killed in historical rituals. Now, in Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, the proud predator – in the form of a recontextualised colonial sculpture – watches over the empty picture frames that once aided the Governor-Generals of the Dutch East Indies in attaining power (over representation as well).