Aditya Novali

Aditya Novali trained as a dalang in Indonesian shadow puppetry before studying architecture and design, eventually incorporating theatricality and built structures into his works as an artist. His Asian (Un)Real Estate Project responds to Indonesia’s lack of affordable urban housing for low-income communities, a problem shared by many growing economies throughout Asia and the world. The work takes the form of an architectural model used to market real estate projects. It presents a section of a presumably endless apartment block, with each apartment a miniature world of its own. Elements of the building can be rotated to expose internal living spaces of some apartments, suggesting the pleasures and adversities of domestic life from one living unit to the next.

Novali originally conceived the work before the Covid-19 pandemic. Today, the sight of a building with all lights on and all inhabitants indoors at home can only remind us of lockdown, when many of us observed unusually active domestic scenes from our own homes with a mix of sympathy and detachment. The model may even suggest a fleeting utopia where all domestic spaces are used but all workplaces are abandoned. Focusing on the lives of the people who inhabit a grid of spaces, Novali reminds us of a time when many struggles and dreams, questions and demands were forced into increasingly small spaces. We might ask what we learned from the pressures of these shrinking spaces, and to what extent we returned to a comfortable space we thought we might never find again.