PRIYAGEETHA DIA


Priyageetha Dia /ப்ரியகீதா டியா/ is an arts practitioner based in Singapore, primarily working with time-based media.

Her works have been part of several group exhibitions including the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India (2022); Attention Seeker, La Trobe Art Institute, Australia (2022); An Exercise of Meaning in a Glitch Season, National Gallery Singapore (2020); 2219: Futures Imagined, ArtScience Museum Singapore (2019). Priyageetha was a resident at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore residencies programme from April to August 2022.

She currently lives and works in Singapore.


(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 imagery 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.

Image credits: Ruey Loon