Arfan Sabran was born in Makassar in 1981. He has recently completed his graduate degree in Biomedicine from Hasanuddin University in Makassar.

Suster Apung” is Arfan Sabran’s first documentary film. It has been received well in both the national and international arenas. This film won three Eagle Awards 2006, sponsored by Metro TV. Since then, Arfan Sabran has decided to begin channeling his personal anxieties through a camera.

In his films, Arfan focuses on social problems, particularly national issues. As a member of his generation, Arfan understands history as a subtle, subjective, and never ending process. His choices fall to obscure cases; minor history that almost never emerges on to the surface. For instance, his work during the residency program, LANDING SOON, in Yogyakarta, concerned the situation after 1965 in Nanggulan, Kulonprogo. Arfan made a film about the near-fatal fate of a gamelan music group in Grubug village after the attempted coup on September 30, 1965, in which stories of ideology, discrimination, friendship, betrayal, and education are unveiled. Through this film, Arfan offers notes on an alternative version of history. At the same time, he tests the general perspective of who is the “enemy” and who is a “friend”, or accusations of “victim” and “victimizer”.

Dutch artist Ralph Kämena (40) works with photography and video. He started his professional career in 1995 after graduating from the Academy for Visual Arts St. Joost in Breda, the Netherlands. He focuses mainly on architectural and urban matters. Very often, the city is his studio, but private rooms and other interiors also capture his attention. He portrays people or their behaviour indirectly through photographing only the places they use. Kämena regards architecture, inside and outside, through the perspective of how it facilitates the events of life. Architecture and the city become venues of experience. In photography, Kämena employs his personal documentary style. Video is used experimentally, often through photo animation techniques that interfere with the subjective experience of time and place.

During his residency in Yogyakarta, Kämena worked on a project on the landscape of the Indonesian bureaucracy system. He photographed people and their surroundings in a direct way. This is a continuation of his project last year on Russian computer programmers, and is also one of the focuses in the Yogyakarta bureaucracy project. The work will be shown in an experimental video installation.

This bureaucracy can be watched only in private.