ELIA NURVISTA

Early Years

Elia Nurvista was born in Yogyakarta in 1983. The roots of her interest in the politics of food may come from her heritage—she has spoken about how her father’s family came from Kalimantan, Borneo, and that while forest clearance was at its peak, the family grocery story profited from selling staples to the growing number of workers in the area. Nurvista earned a BFA in visual arts from the Indonesian Institute of Arts in Yogyakarta. She formed a collective with three other students that upcycled thriftes clothes into wearable garments while also working as an interior designer. In 2015 she was a co-founder of Bakudapan, a collective and study group that uses food as a gateway to discuss global issues. In 2025 she spent 10 months in Florence at Villa Romana.

Elia Nurvista: Artworks

Elia Nurvista’s works use food production and consumption as a frame to examine and understand labour, politics, culture and gender in a modern socioeconomic context.

• In Sucker Zucker (2016–), she highlighted the resemblance between crystalline sugar and diamond and jewel stones—the extraction of both products has involved exploitation, labour and slavery. Her bright sculptures were displayed like jewels in a shop, and as the work has developed she added a video and a mural.
• Long Hanging Fruits (2024) connects colonialism and the modern economy using batik, embroidery and palm oil dye on fabric, while earlier iterations of the project used AI to make the images, calling into question whose labour is used in palm oil production.
• Bodies in Penumbra: The Soft Machinery of Light (2026) is a sculpture examining what happens to the materials used in the extraction and production of food materials. Two figures appear like classical sculptures, but they are made of palm oil wax which appears to be slowly melting. Beside them, palm fronds are sculpted into tree-like forms, while a palm trunk reveals human faces.
• The work of labourers in plantations (and its co-existence with the environment) is a huge theme in Nurvista’s practice: for example, her first film, Plantation Tragedy (2026), plus her large-scale batik textile tableaus Cyborg (2026) and Exhausted (2026), made using palm oil wax and concentrating on women’s work on plantations.

Elia Nurvista: Exhibitions

Select Solo and Two-Person Exhibitions

• Nafasan Bumi—An Endless Harvest (with Bagus Pandega), Singapore Art Museum (2026)
• Shopping: Pineapple, Sauerkraut, Wasabi, Chickpea, Šopa Gallery, Košice (2023)
• Reconstructed Biotope (with Youngho Lee), Cemeti Institute for Art and Society, Yogyakarta (2021)
• Früchtlinge (with Andreas Pereira Paz), Frankfurt and Berlin (2019)

Select Group Exhibitions

• Like Leaves, Salonul de proiecte, Bucharest (2024)
• Municipal Kitchens, nGbk, Berlin (2024)
• See You at The Studio! Ten Years with Artists in Residence, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2023)
• At The Table, Garage Rotterdam (2023)
• Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present, Sharjah (2023)
• Disturbants of land, breath, sound: Aesthetics of Post-colonial culture, Space C (Coreana Museum of Art), Seoul (2022)
• Cast But One Shadow: Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities, UP Vargas Museum, Manila (2021)
• Singapore Biennale (2019)

Further reading

• Elia Nurvista’s website
• Conversation with Elia Nurvista in Ocula (2026)
• Elia Nurvista’s Instagram
• Interview with Melbourne Asia Review __(2025)

Elia Nurvista FAQs

Ocula