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Indonesian Artist Collective Tromarama Takes Over Times Square
Tromarama's new video project will be on view as part of Time Square Arts's Midnight Moment, in partnership with the Kitchen.
Tromarama's new video project will be on view as part of Time Square Arts's Midnight Moment, in partnership with the Kitchen.
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The Indonesian art collective Tromarama was established in 2006, composed of members Febie Babyrose, Ruddy Hatumena, and Herbert Hans. All graduates of the Institut Teknologi of Bandung, their work explores the nature of reality (often in their practice referred to as hyperreality) in the digital age, working across a diverse range of media—including stop-motion animation, video art, installation, and lenticular prints—to investigate the boundaries between the quotidian and the novel, and the role technology plays in the evolution of this line.
The collective’s latest video project, Turn On #2 (2026), will be getting its splashiest stage yet when it blankets more than 90 electronic billboards in New York’s Times Square. On view as part of the Times Square Arts initiative Midnight Moment, the work will screen nightly 11:57 p.m.–12 a.m., through July 31.
This outing emerges from a partnership between Times Square Arts and the Kitchen, one of New York’s oldest nonprofit art spaces that recently staged Tromarama’s first institutional exhibition in the U.S., titled “Upon a Machine.” The show employed video, installation, and algorithmic processes to home in on the sometimes-nebulous and always-evolving border between the virtual and the physical. Visitors could trace the complex relationships between those two realms through information, images, sound, as well as cultural aspects like consumer culture and media.
For its Midnight Moment, Tromarama, which is represented by Kiang Malingue, Hong Kong, deepens and expands these themes.
Turn On #2 takes sharp focus on how technology alters both our individual and collective sense of reality—a longstanding area of investigation for the collective—and reshapes how everyday life is experienced and perceived. Produced as a continuous, choreographed loop, images of electric fans seem to blow upon changing images of familiar scenes. Though the order of cause and effect appears clear at first, the logic wavers as the work progresses. The influence of the fans and the images on one another is obscured, raising questions around memory, social and cultural identities, and what constitutes reality—as well as who gets to decide the answers for these questions.
Presented in one of the most iconic and internationally recognized urban spaces, Tromarama’s work takes on a monumental, truly immersive element. The multitude of screens, with some stretching several stories high, against the backdrop of Times Square heightens the awareness of the digital/physical boundary, unsettling preconceived conclusions about where one ends and the other begins. The dissolving coherency of the images moving across the digital screens creates a moment where what is real and what is superimposed is ultimately malleable, and even up to personal interpretation.
Tromarama’s Turn On #2 (2026) is on view nightly 11:57 p.m.–12 a.m. through July 31, 2026.