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Avianti Armand: Living her two worlds
Avianti Armand’s admiration for art is the force behind her award-winning works in architecture and literature, two areas that she is passionate about.
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Momoji at Aston Simatupang (Courtesy of Aston Priority Simatupang/-)
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vianti Armand is perhaps best known for her award-winning poetry collections, including Museum Masa Kecil (Museum of Childhood), which earned her the Kusala Sastra Khatulistiwa award for best poetry collection last year.
Yet, she is also an accomplished architect, having been involved in numerous projects, including the time when she led a team of curators for the first-ever Indonesia Pavilion in the country’s first participation in the world-renowned Venice Architecture Biennale in Italy back in 2014.
Alongside her daily activities at her company, Avianti Armand Architecture Studio, she also manages the Indonesia Architecture Museum Foundation – a virtual museum that makes online exhibitions about Indonesian architecture with archives that the public can access for free on its website, arsitekturindonesia.org.
The exhibitions shed a light on history, figures and issues in the long journey of Indonesian architecture, including a heated debate on social media about a mosque designed by architect and West Java Governor Ridwan Kamil. Some claimed a triangular motif at the mosque was a symbol alluding to the Illuminati or the Antichrist.
She is also the editor-in-chief of ‘a publication’, a publishing company that produces books about architecture and provides classes on topics related to the discipline, such as gimmicks in architecture and Indonesian architecture in the era of Guided Democracy.
In a talk at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara (MACAN) in Jakarta, she explored the role of architecture in contemporary art and society, highlighting stories behind the works of acclaimed architects, from French-Swiss Bernard Tschumi to British-Iraqi Zaha Hadid.
