Memories of a Home: Studio 22nya and a house can still catch fire, even if you're home 24/7
In picturing a house, there is an immediacy – ingrained in us – to associate it with an orderly structure: a sturdy roof, glass windows, wooden doors, dove-white walls, ceramic tiles. This neatly arranged image ties the “having of a home” to a sense of order, where the symbols of domesticity promise stability. Oftentimes framed as the “pinnacle of a woman’s life,” a woman is seen as whole when she has, or is placed within, a home. In Ajeng Martia Saputri’s exhibition at Studio22nya, however, this notion is ruptured.
Entitled A house can still catch fire, even if you’re home 24/7, Ajeng transforms the gallery into a site of examination. Her body of work becomes an act of recollection and reimagination of what was once a home, with each piece presented as a site of ruin testifying to the artist’s lived experience. There is no clear “beginning–middle–end” in the arrangement of work, which suggests a fluidity in reading the timeline; perhaps, a gesture towards the cyclical nature of rebirth and repair. Here, viewers are invited to construct their own chronology of the event, treating each piece as a fragment that demands to be pieced into a narrative altogether. From watercolour to sculpture, Ajeng embeds stories across her chosen mediums, treating each composition as a trace of events leading up to the fire.
The softness of the pink, white, and red palette acts as a buffer to the truths contained within each piece, and unfolds as a gentle invitation to draw the audience in. At first glance, I was captivated by the exhibition’s centrepiece: a sculpture of a melted house titled The Burned House, not particularly for the beauty and grandeur of its form, but its lingering scent of perfumed wax. It reminded me of any attempts of tracing memory, as it does not usually arrive in recognition of absolute brutality, but as a residue – that resurfaces through attempts of remembrance. Perhaps this relationship (of memory work) is echoed in the sculpture’s placement, as it is accompanied by The Documentation of the Firehouse looping in its background. In confronting what remains of the house, the viewer is compelled to witness both the fire and the ruins of its aftermath.
In acknowledging the fire, Ajeng invites viewers to consider the conditions that preceded and culminated in it. A series of watercolours acts as fragments of remembering “the life” within the home: scissors alongside a knife (Attempt #1), a pair of scissors (Attempt #2), a house before the fire (Facade), two rabbits in embrace (A Mother and Her Bunny), traces of blood (My Womb, Strands of Hair and Traces of Red), and a woman’s body marked by C-section scars beside a broken paperclip (Mother Skin). These symbols require time to be fully understood, and once registered, it presents the viewers with a paradox: the softness of watercolour conceals a brutality embedded in its delicate depiction of images, revealing the fractures – often overlooked – within the domestic space.
Following the fire, a series of dioramas (Furniture Relics #1–#4) depict the remnants of broken furniture, pointing to the material losses left in its wake. Notably absent, however, are signs of bodily harm amongst the house’s inhibitors, as there are no figures that bear the marks of the fire, nor were there an homage placed to mourn any explicit casualties. Those within the home seem to have escaped, leaving behind only the remnants of what was once a home. Perhaps we only catch a glimpse of their afterlives through the Three Witches, which presents a strikingly different tone in its work: we see three figures smiling, locked in a joyful embrace. Is this what or who emerges from the ruins? The work stands apart in material and context, offering a possibility of warmth and solidarity amid the aftermath.
After several turns around the gallery, and my own attempts to grasp the full extent of destruction across Ajeng’s works, the fire had dissipated into a metaphor. And what emerges is the quiet insistence that something continues beyond it. Perhaps the exhibition does not offer closure nor does it offer the comfort of reconstruction or a return to an idealized home. Instead, Ajeng situates us, as viewers, in an in-between space, where memory, loss, and survival coexist without hierarchy. The home, once imagined as a site of certainty, is revealed to be fragile and porous, always susceptible – to rupture, and its own ruins. In this way, A house can still catch fire, even if you’re home 24/7 becomes less about destruction and more about the complex, unfinished process of living with what remains.
