PRIYAGEETHA DIA

PRIYAGEETHA
D
IA

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

2021. RITE OF THE TIME TELLER 


HD, 16.9 format, colour and sound, 3 min 36 sec
Music Credits: Lux 1 (Original Mix) by Seefeel, Starethrough EP, Produced by Warp Records

As part of Between the Living and the Archive exhibition. Curated by Fajrina Razak and Syaheedah Iskandar.

Using a collection of images to formulate a digital archive for the future, Rite of the Time Teller is an introspection of gestures and practices passed down through ancestral, and everyday rituals within the Tamizh household. Existing as semidocumentary and semifiction, the work reimagines the repositories of connecting collective existence through Tamizh ancestral practices of knowing and being within Southeast Asia. To locate is to return; the living archive as an embodiment becomes a site of an imaginary continuum between the present and future.

The central figure is symbolic of a contemporary, mythological presentation of celestial divinities found in Hindu mythology. It demonstrates the uncanny contemplation of time through the imagery of the past, present, and the birth of the future cradled in an infant-like form. The tangibility in the ringing of the bell, the extension of the nails, and the gesture of the hands, mirror the fluidity of spatial temporality of the living archive on screen and in the physical installation.

Images by Ruey Loon