Mirage: Agape
Commissioned by Singapore Biennale 2025.
On Mirage the series:
Riar Rizaldi’s films explore the roots and repercussions of modern science and advanced technology on the social, political, and cultural life of humans and nonhumans in Southeast Asia. His latest work is a dialogue between particle physics and ideas about the nature of God in tropical Sufi mysticism. It introduces the life and work of sixteenth-century Sumatran philosopher, poet, and Sufi mystic Hamzah Fansuri. In his writings, Fansuri conjectured that God infiltrates every aspect of the universe, down to the smallest particle, and the universe itself is God’s radiating holographic projection on a two-dimensional plane. Toward the end of his life, Fansuri was deemed a heretic and he and his disciples persecuted. His ideas, however, anticipated by several hundred years breakthroughs in particle physics—the notion that the universe is composed of subatomic particles including both matter and antimatter—as well as the holographic principle—the theory that the universe is, in fact, two-dimensional.
Episode 3
Duration 29’16”
The third entry in Riar Rizaldi’s Mirage series continues his investigation of mysticism and particle physics. Framed as a sword-and-sandals historical re- enactment—a genre prominently produced in Indonesia during the Soeharto military dictatorship—Mirage: Agape examines Sufi mysticism in the Indonesian archipelago, using the spread of various religions from the maritime hub of Barus as a mechanism to introduce the theory of emanation. In contrast to both creationism and materialism, emanation theory posits that the universe, and everything contained within it, “flows” from a single infinite and unchanging point. Within the world of the film, two protagonists embody matter and anti-matter, generating an endless cycle of destruction and reincarnation each time they touch. Barus, as an ancient mystical town in the Indo-Malay archipelago and a place where Sufi mysticism flourished in the fifteenth century, forms the primary foundation of this work.
Film still
Installation view at Installation view at Singapore Biennale 2025, Singapore (2025).
Single-channel video, 29 Minutes, quadraphonic sound, and animatronic head of J.P. Coen
Image courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.