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PRIYAGEETHA DIA

PRIYAGEETHA
DIA

works with time-based media and installation.

Recent exhibitions include Singapore Art Museum (2023); Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kerala (2022–2023); La Trobe Art Institute, Australia (2022); National Gallery Singapore (2020); and Art Science Museum, Singapore (2019). She was an artist-in-residence at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore in 2022 and the SEA AiR—Studio Residencies at the Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands in 2023. She is currently a resident under the SMU AiR Libraries from Aug to Nov 2023.

She lives and works in Singapore.

PROJECT THINGSssSss

(ig.)priyageetha.dia
(m.)priyaaadia@gmail.com

2017. GOLDEN STAIRCASE

 
Gold foil, adhesive
Site-specific installation at Block 103 Jalan Rajah



The spaces encountered in Singapore’s public housing are bound to certain demarcations of ownership, establishing personal boundaries within the public realm. This site-specific work was an intent to explore, negotiate, and redefine what it is to constitute a communal space in a HDB setting. The materiality of gold, symbolic of transformation and preservation, provokes the banality of this quiescent, grey space. The staircase as a central feature dwells into Eliade’s concept of the axis mundi, a vertical cosmic pillar that links Heaven and Earth and centring it to the Universe. “Dwellings and archaic central situations utilizing a pillar can be useful as a means for communication within a community, mirroring the heavens and the sky.” Here, the staircase in the HDB space represents the cosmic axis as the naval centre of the architecture, enabling the elevation of a physical being within this shared space.