Frieze Seoul | Priyageetha Dia

6 - 9 Settembre 2023
  • Priyageetha Dia, TURBINE TROPICS, 2023

    TURBINE TROPICS, 2023

    Yeo Workshop is pleased to showcase a solo presentation of  a new  video work by Singaporean artist Priyageetha Dia for the second edition of Frieze Seoul. Dia’s practice is concerned with speculative methods of counter-narratives that correspond to Southeast Asian postcolonial histories and the transnational migration of ethnic communities. Through poetic interventions using time-based and print mediums, specifically 3D animation and game engine software, Dia translates historical flashpoints into sensorial environments.


    This new body of work continues her current research around Southeast Asian plantation histories, in particular rubber plantations And makes significant parallels between Data extractivism and the colonial plantation system, though distinct phenomena arising from different eras and contexts, share, particularly in the Southeast Asian context.

    Read The Full Press Release Here
  • Priyageetha Dia, Render_TurbineTropics_01, 2023

    Render_TurbineTropics_01

    In Southeast Asia, the colonial plantation system has historical roots. Where plantation corporatism turned British Malaya (now Singapore and Malaysia) into one of Britain’s most profitable colonies and the world’s largest rubber exporter in the 19th Century, European colonial powers, particularly the British in Malaysia and the Dutch in Indonesia, established vast plantation economies by exploiting local natural resources, primarily rubber and spices. These colonial powers imposed extractive economic structures, reconfiguring landscapes and labour forces to benefit distant capitalist economies. The extracted value largely bypassed the local areas and the people from whom it was derived.
  • Priyageetha Dia, Render_TurbineTropics_02, 2023

    Render_TurbineTropics_02

    In the contemporary era of digital capitalism, data extractivism draws unsettling parallels with this history. Just as land and labour were exploited for commodity production, the activities, choices, and behaviours of internet users are now being mined and commodified. A thriving digital economy, centred on data, has emerged, with tech companies extracting, processing, and selling vast amounts of user-generated data.
  • GROUP EXHIBITION: SAM CONTEMPORARIES: RESIDUES & REMIXES

    LAMENT H.E.A.T, 2023

    Commissioned by Singapore Art Museum, LAMENT H.E.A.T is a multimedia installation primarily composed of rubberwood and latex, which showcases the significance of rubber. Rubberwood, also known as parawood, is a type of hardwood that comes from the rubber tree or hevea brasiliensis. The pattern on the exterior of the installation imitates the markings carved onto rubber trees when they are tapped for latex with the herring-bone method. Rubber, a sought-after raw material in various industries, led to the establishment of rubber plantations across British Malaya (today, Singapore and Malaysia) as part of the British colonial regime in the 19th century.

  • Exhibition View: SAM Contemporaries: Residues and Remixes, Singapore Art Museum. Singapore (18 May - 24 September 2023). Image credit Singapore Art Museum.

  • Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022-2023

    The Sea is a Blue Memory, 2022

    Through poetic interventions in public space, speculative narratives, computer-generated imagery and appropriation of stock photography, Priyageetha Dia translates historical flashpoints into sensorial environments. In this body of work commissioned for Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022-2023, Dia conjures up experiences of Indian migration and labour in Malaya’s rubber plantations under British colonial rule. Plantation corporatism turned Malaya into one of Britain’s most profitable colonies and the world’s largest exporter of rubber. This prosperous commercial enterprise was made possible by the migration of hundreds of thousands of workers from South India to different parts of Malaya during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to work as indentured labourers – a system of disguised slavery.

     

    Priyageetha Dia

    The Sea is a Blue Memory, 2022

    3D animation video

    10:25mins, 4k H.264, stereo sound

    Edition of 3 plus 1 artist's proof

    Presented as part of: Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022-2023: In Our Veins Flow Ink and Fire, Aspinwall House, Fort Kochi, Kerala, India (12 December, 2022 – 10 April, 2023)

     

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  • Installation View: Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022-2023: In Our Veins Flow Ink and Fire, Aspinwall House, Fort Kochi, Kerala, India (12 December, 2022 – 10 April, 2023). Image credit Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022-2023.

  • Priyageetha Dia, liquid.vision_nil.land (after MalayaRubberPlantation, Getty), 2022

    LIQUID.VISION_NIL.LAND (AFTER MALAYARUBBERPLANTATION, GETTY), 2022

    The series of companion prints liquid.vision_nil.land (after MalayaRubberPlantation, Getty) proposes another mode of attentive looking. Appropriating a single stock image of Malayan rubber plantations, Dia disrupts colonial conventions of representation. The distant and omniscient gaze of the plantation worker is fractured into intimate cropped portraits of individual labourers. While acts of appropriation might not restore the colonial subjects’ rights to self-image, they intervene in a system of representation that has remained comfortably untouched and unquestioned in its commodified form. Dia’s gesture highlights that the relationship with colonial photography for colonised subjects and their heirs is not straightforward. As violent as they are, these images are often rare material traces accounting for the existence of people and communities otherwise deprived of representation.

     

    Exhibition View: Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022-2023: In Our Veins Flow Ink and Fire, Aspinwall House, Fort Kochi, Kerala, India (12 December, 2022 – 10 April, 2023). Image credit Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022-2023.

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  • Solo Exhibition: Forget Me, Forget Me Not

    we.remain.in.multiple.motions_Malaya, 2022

    Priyageetha Dia’s animation, we.remain.in.multiple.motions_Malaya, conjures a collective voice of the labourers into a poem that foregrounds the experience of sea travel and labour in the estates. The narration added to the video is constructed around a shared vocabulary across Tamil and Malay languages. The bilingual glossary permeates through the poem, minimising the default monopoly of the English language and its capacity to homogenise voices and experiences. In counterpoint to Gilman’s colonial account that reduced human lives to the mercantile speech of “supplies,” “insufficient quantity,” “defective quality,” “heavy cost of importation”, Dia infuses her writing with the scents of camphor, sesame oil, and sandalwood. The rhythmic patterns given by bodily sounds, breathing and the pulse are amplified by the musician Tesla Manaf’s percussion work. The artist’s poetic tone renders contextual specificity, sensorial imagery, and linguistic texture to the experience of sea-crossing and work in the plantations. This hybrid idiom alludes to a postcolonial literary tradition that embraces complex experiences of displacement and belonging.

     

     

    Priyageetha Dia

    we.remain.in.multiple.motions_Malaya, 2022

    12 min, HD video with stereo sound, CGI, 16:9, 4k, colour

    Edition of 3 + 1 Artist's Proof

    Presented as part of

    Asia Now, 20 - 23 October 2022, Monnaie de Paris, Paris

    Forget Me, Forget Me Not, 21 May - 16 July 2022, Yeo Workshop, Singapore

     

  • Exhibition view: Priyageetha Dia: Forget Me, Forget Me Not, 21 May - 16 July 2022, Yeo Workshop, Singapore. 

  • Priyageetha Dia, _kolam.bangle.hand, 2022

    _KOLAM.BANGLE.HAND, 2022

    The sense of haptic in the artist’s animation is amplified by her relinquishment of a linear perspective and resistance to depth vision to which Western’s modern traditions of representation are tied. Besides, the interactions between her protagonist and the environment enhance the haptic sensibility in the artist’s work. Transferring the ritual drawing of kolam, which traditionally marks the thresholds of homes or the margins of the streets onto the body, Dia continuously strives to dissolve the boundaries between body and environment. This spatial merging is amplified in the architecture of the exhibition where enlarged hands on the wall guide, embrace, or entrap the viewers inside.

    Read the full text, Forget Me, Forget Me Not by Anca Rujoiu.
  • Group Exhibition: Between the Living and the Archive

    Rite of the time teller, 2021

    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, everyday rituals within the Tamizh household. Existing between fiction and nonfiction, autobiography, documentary and documentation, subject and object, the moving image installation reimagines the repositories of connecting collective existence accumulated through Tamizh ancestral practices of knowing and being within the Southeast Asian diaspora.

     

    Presented as part of Between the Living and the Archive exhibition (9 March - 28 March 2021). Curated by Fajrina Razak and Syaheedah Iskandar. Gillman Barracks, Singapore.

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  • Exhibition View: Between the Living and the Archive exhibition (9 March - 28 March 2021). Gillman Barracks, Singapore. Image credit Ruey Loon.

  • Group Exhibition: An Exercise of Meaning in a Glitch Season, Part of Proposals of Novel Ways of Being

    Priyageetha Dia, LONG LIVE THE NEW FLES$S$SH, 2020, single channel video 16:9 format, colour and sound (stereo), 4 min 30 sec, edition of 3 plus 1 artist's proof.

  • LONG LIVE THE NEW FLES$S$SH, 2020,
    Priyageetha Dia, LONG LIVE THE NEW FLES$S$SH, 2020. Image courtesy National Gallery Singapore

    LONG LIVE THE NEW FLES$S$SH, 2020

    The video work expands the possibilities for imagining brownness, imaging it into a digital consciousness. It attempts to reconfigure and magnify the presence of the generic, femme-presenting other through computer-generated imagery and data-moshing, inquiring the grounds on would it mean for marginalised identities to be in the matrix. The title is an adaptation of Nicolas Provost’s film Long live the new flesh (2009) in which data moshing is utilised to render a newer visual experience to films. Using it as a catalyst to fragment the visual language of racial, gendered trauma by breaking, morphing, fracturing and compressing frames as an infinite failure to perform in reading the body in the machine.

     

    Presented as part of An Exercise of Meaning in a Glitch Season, Part of Proposals of Novel Ways of Being (04 September 2020 to 21 February 2021. Curated by Syaheedah Iskandar. National Gallery Singapore, Singapore.

     

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  • MONO FIG.1, 2019

    Priyageetha Dia

    Mono Fig.1, 2019

    Single channel video

    5 mins 54 seconds

    Edition of 20 + 1 Artist's Proof