Home, Body, and Endurance in Fffffandy’s Solo Presentation
Home is often understood as the earliest structure we inhabit: a space that, through lived experience, shapes our habits, ways of thinking, and how we make sense of the world. In many cultures, home is tied to the idea of permanence; ownership is valued over renting, settlement over movement, staying put over nomadism. Stability offers familiarity and provides a framework that makes everyday life easier to comprehend.
For Fffffandy, however, the experience of home no longer appears as a fixed architecture. His formative years were marked by displacement when he lived abroad following the 1998 riots in Indonesia. Upon returning, the meaning of home shifted: it was no longer an achievement secured through ownership, but something sustained through impermanence. Home ceased to be a final destination and instead became a journey continually shaped by circumstance.
Living under such provisional conditions demands constant negotiation, often in situations that feel more like traps than choices. The exhibition Strange Currencies encapsulates this logic by framing daily life as a series of transactions. To remain in a city, a country, or any place called “home,” time is exchanged for routine, comfort for compromise, and mobility for congestion. These lopsided and exhausting exchanges accumulate into a kind of survival mode; not because they are fair, but because they make staying possible.
This logic extends into Fffffandy’s works. His drawings convey a sustained sense of fatigue: figures and objects do not strive toward resolution, but instead suggest ways of carrying on. Emerging from states of despair, complaint, and limitation, the works neither dramatize struggle nor offer escape. They operate within a temporality of endurance, where discomfort is acknowledged and absorbed. Humor appears as part of the negotiation, without turning into comedy that offers easy relief.
A similar approach is evident in Fffffandy’s furniture, where domestic objects function as carriers of habitus and become bodily proxies shaped by use. His chairs, typically associated with rest, are designed to barely function as furniture: they can be sat on, but never truly settled into. They reflect a body accustomed to coping rather than relaxing, as comfort is deliberately withheld. In several drawings, chairs appear misaligned or obstructive, operating less as supports than as provisional structures that record how endurance is learned through repeated use.
The exhibition space itself extends this idea. Traces of interior space appear through partial walls and exposed structural elements, detached from any specific location. Plastic coverings are applied to walls that are already finished, suspending any sense of finality. Taken together, these elements propose a different form of domestic architecture—one that reflects a way of living through continual adjustment rather than a focus on arrival. Strange Currencies becomes an invitation to confront the systems that shape us, while acknowledging that our relationship with them is never truly complete.
The exhibition Strange Currencies is open to the public until 29 March 2026 at C ON TEMPORARY, Gormeteria Level 2, Jalan Pasir Kaliki 176, Bandung.
