Frieze Seoul | Priyageetha Dia

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

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.