Poster design by Annisa Rianti.
Presented for the first time in Bangkok, Nova Contemporary presents a survey of Aditya Novali’s work produced over the last six years, including a new body of work, that offers a cartography of our rapidly changing present and unstable future through perspectives from contemporary life as well as geological deep time.
While geological epochs are seen as products of slow change, the Anthropocene has been characterized by speed. Runaway climate change, rising water, surging population, extinction and expanding technologies compress our sense of space and time. In an era defined by pandemics, war and ecological breakdown, we are experiencing a collapse of our idea of home through fragmentation and perpetual crisis, the images we see of the world around us are reduced to an apocalyptic fantasy of human finitude, world finitude, the end.
Novali’s recent work recognizes the need to develop another logic of existence, ways of restoring a sense of home using expansive modes of mapping to demonstrate the fluidity of place and territory. Traditional modes of seeing and feeling are disrupted as the artist presents perspectives that shift, layer and multiply, destablising our paradigm of orientation. Through a large LED-lit, interactive map of Sundaland, an ice-age era continent that covered Semenanjung Malaka (now Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Laos, Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia), Sumatera, Java and Kalimantan into one connected landmass, Identifying South East Asia: Borderless Humanity (2018) invites us to look again at this historical continent, still considered a myth, that experienced many extinctions and stories of survival. In the Wall: Asian (Un)Real Estate Project (2023), new types of dynamic visuality arise, in a scale model of a low income housing estate in Indonesia, that offers multiple interactive vignettes of apartment life, depicting society, our atomisation as well as our urgent interconnectedness.
A new body of work of sculptures, drawings and layered acrylic constructed paintings, has a starting point in the discarded temple stones that Novali encountered on many research visits to ancient temple sites across South East Asia. Studying the forms of discarded stones and bricks that used an interlocking form of construction, the artist develops both floor based sculptures and wall based ‘maps’ that summons stories of the present being built by absence, through traces and fragments of the past.
Ends invites audiences to shift their perspective and be made aware of their own gaze, through the different scales and planes in Novali's work. Here we are invited to remember stories of our present and historical survival through many endings, the work in the exhibition functioning like a memory flooding back, a long-buried historic past that re-emerges suddenly into the present in the form of a stone, a scrap, a remnant, a story.