an imagined place (here and now)
Satpreet Kahlon
On View: April 4 – May 23, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 4 from 3:00 – 5:00 PM
Gallery Hours: Thursdays 2:00 – 8:00 PM, Fridays 12:00 – 6:00 PM, Saturdays 12:00 – 4:00 PM
an imagined place (here and now), installation at PICA | Photo: Mario Gallucci
PICA presents an imagined place (here and now), a multichannel audio and visual installation by the Brooklyn-based artist Satpreet Kahlon. A 2022 Creative Exchange Lab artist, Kahlon’s exhibition will transform PICA’s 10,000-square-foot main space into an immersive exploration of fugitivity, deep space time, geologic memory, and possibility. A newly composed soundscape, both orchestral and intimate, threads through the installation, blending otherworldly registers to collapse distance between planetary time and lived embodied experience.
an imagined place (here and now) centers around a massive installation on the scale of 2025 PN7, a quasi-moon that has been following the Earth’s orbit since the 1960s, but only discovered by NASA in 2025. PN7 becomes a jumping off point for the artist to continue her investigation into the memory of nonhuman entities, including light rays and geologic entities (such as mountains), the Earth, and asteroids.
Kahlon’s replica of PN7 is a 65’ x 80’ structure made from almost exclusively recycled materials, including styrofoam, wood, and cardboard. The work explores a fiction in which PN7 encounters and falls in love with the Earth during its travels through outer space. The quasi-moon then begins to follow the orbit of our planet, secretly watching and storing memories like time capsules within the rocky confines of its body. As PN7 observes the relationship between the Earth and Moon, it becomes hopeful that somewhere in the universe, there might be a planet for it to love and be loved by. Through this fiction, Kahlon explores fugitivity as a form of survival, unrequited love, the power of geologic time and deep space memory to teach us lessons about perpetual apocalypse, and the hope for a just environmental future.
Alongside the recreation of PN7, the exhibition includes installation components with immersive audio, reflected video fields, and photograph-based sculptures with images from the artist’s personal archive. A core feature of the sound score references Kahlon’s ongoing engagement with the archiving of Boliyan, held in the exhibition as one strand within a larger structure of memory, relation, and refusal. For Kahlon, collage and assemblage across many mediums and constructs offers an opportunity to reframe images and memory. Existent narratives surrounding the artist’s childhood were misleadingly happy, disguising a childhood dominated by abuse and neglect. Through an imagined place (here and now), Kahlon hopes to tell a truer, more honest story of her life, and in so doing, release herself from a familial orbit of harm.
Support
This exhibition is supported in part by Sarah Miller Meigs, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New Archives (Matthew Offenbacher and Satpreet Kahlon), Ridwell, and PICA’s Visual Art Circle.
About the artist
Satpreet Kahlon (b. 1989) is a Panjabi-born artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She received a full fellowship to pursue her MFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating in 2019. In addition to her studio practice, which has been featured in Hyperallergic and Artforum, she co-founded and -ran an Indigenous arts organization that supported 400 artists with over $2 million of opportunities and rematriated 1.5 acres of greenspace that was slated for development during her tenure from 2017-2023. For this work, she was named one of the Most Influential People in Seattle by Seattle Magazine in 2019, and was a 2022 Roddenberry Fellow for “new and innovative strategies to safeguard human rights and ensure an equal and just society for all.”
Kahlon's practice has been supported by Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA; National Endowment for the Arts; Robert Rauschenberg Foundation; Foundation for Contemporary Arts; Critical Minded; Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), Portland, OR; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; 4Culture, Seattle, WA; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA; Magnum Foundation, New York, NY; Brown University, Providence, RI; and Bellevue Art Museum, Bellevue, WA, among others. She is the 2024 recipient of the Foundwork Artist Prize.