Alia Safira
Alia Safira is a female visual artist from Pontianak who employs painting as a medium to respond to social issues, articulate personal emotions, and depict the dynamics of everyday life. A graduate of Art Education from Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta (UNY), she actively explores contemporary painting practices, with oil paint at the core of her creative experimentation.
The works presented are characterised by a distinctive painterly style and a vibrant, colourful palette. Safira is drawn to visuals marked by stillness and flat expression, inviting viewers to immerse themselves in quiet atmospheres and layered emotional states through the gaze, objects, and visual compositions she constructs.
Title : Orang Kota
Medium : Oil on Canvas
Size : 100x100 cm
Year : 2025
With weary eyes, holding a trolley, queuing, it stands before the checkout counter of a supermarket. Standing atop the ruins of a forest, it performs the rituals of shopping transactions, consumption its hand gripping a mobile phone as though it were human. It places a pile of food that must now be purchased, perhaps marking the loss of instincts once rooted in an arboreal and omnivorous life, spent largely among the trees now destroyed by modern development that has stolen its world.
Toy cars, no longer playful, recall the echoing roar of engines sounds that crushed its home. Heavy machinery resounds: hauling timber, excavating soil, flattening what remains of roots. A plant sprinkler left inside the trolley conjures the image of water no longer nourishing fertile ground. Hope fades; no space remains to celebrate life. An axe stands as witness to the forest’s wounds, while stacks of cement bags lie ready to bury the last roots beneath concrete.
Its heart beats painfully, mourning memories of branches once explored and sheltered beneath. What is the cashier thinking? Their gaze appears suspicious. A figure wearing a construction helmet calmly scans the items laid before them. Is there no room left to stay? What of tranquillity? Or is your home, your workplace, your space of leisure still not wide enough?
In the distance, the sky appears beautiful, a signpost marked “escape,” its direction no longer clear. With a heart still beating, it longs for a home that will never return.
Title : Orang Kota
Medium : Oil on Canvas
Size : 100x100 cm
Year : 2025
With weary eyes, holding a trolley, queuing, it stands before the checkout counter of a supermarket. Standing atop the ruins of a forest, it performs the rituals of shopping transactions, consumption its hand gripping a mobile phone as though it were human. It places a pile of food that must now be purchased, perhaps marking the loss of instincts once rooted in an arboreal and omnivorous life, spent largely among the trees now destroyed by modern development that has stolen its world.
Toy cars, no longer playful, recall the echoing roar of engines sounds that crushed its home. Heavy machinery resounds: hauling timber, excavating soil, flattening what remains of roots. A plant sprinkler left inside the trolley conjures the image of water no longer nourishing fertile ground. Hope fades; no space remains to celebrate life. An axe stands as witness to the forest’s wounds, while stacks of cement bags lie ready to bury the last roots beneath concrete.
Its heart beats painfully, mourning memories of branches once explored and sheltered beneath. What is the cashier thinking? Their gaze appears suspicious. A figure wearing a construction helmet calmly scans the items laid before them. Is there no room left to stay? What of tranquillity? Or is your home, your workplace, your space of leisure still not wide enough?
In the distance, the sky appears beautiful, a signpost marked “escape,” its direction no longer clear. With a heart still beating, it longs for a home that will never return.