an imagined place (here and now)
April 4-May 23, 2026
solo exhibition at the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art
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
a full-scale replica 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.
Materials List:
recycled styrofoam, scrap wood collected (2014–2026) from woodshop trash, curbside furniture finds, and old Christmas trees; plaster; earth pigment; beeswax; rainwater collected in Portland (2026); archival images pasted onto recycled cardboard boxes; rocks collected in a cornfield in Nebraska where the artist witnessed the full solar eclipse (2017); salvaged beads (glass, plastic, stone); weaving yarn; archival images printed on fabric; embroidery thread; recycled sequins; salvaged tile pieces; gifted obsidian; earrings gifted to the artist by Gurpreet Phabi Ji (2018); salvaged and cut acrylic mirror; vintage sheesha; graphite; hot glue; staples
archival home videos from the Ketcham and Wallace-Kelly families; archival home videos filmed between 1926 and 1998; footage from a documentary about the poet Shiv Kumar Batalvi, directed by Balwant Gargi; footage from the unmanned Apollo 6 mission (courtesy of the NASA Archives); footage from a PBS documentary about space from the 1960s; and additional footage from a documentary about metal work in South Asia from the 1950s (courtesy of the Indian Ministry of Information)
archival audio of Madan Bala Sandhu singing the poetry of Shiv Kumar Batalvi; NASA recordings sonifying magnetic fields, solar flares and plasma waves near and around earth; boliyaan sung by matriarchs in the artist’s family; recordings of soil in Brooklyn, NY; Portland, OR; the inside of the artist’s mouth; and the artist’s vocals
Excerpt from essay by curator Kristan Kennedy:
“Something that once traveled through deep space now inhabits the cavernous interior of a room. A wandering celestial body, one that has spent decades drifting alongside Earth’s path around the sun, has been translated into matter that can be circled, stood inside of, listened to. Cosmic distance folds inward until it meets the scale of the human body. What once existed far beyond perception becomes something we move through.
Astronomers use the term quasi-moon to describe a mass that appears to orbit Earth while actually maintaining its own orbit around the sun. It is never fully captured by Earth’s gravity. The motion is subtler, an extended choreography of proximity and drift. The object travels beside our planet for decades, sometimes centuries, before eventually slipping away again. "Goodbye…see you soon… we will miss you... " These bodies are temporary companions. They arrive slowly, linger for long stretches of time, and then depart.
Satpreet Kahlon imagines such a body otherwise. In her telling, PN7 becomes a lover. Encountering Earth during its long journey through space, the wandering object falls quietly into devotion. It follows the planet across the solar system, watching from a distance. It studies the movements of oceans, the rise and erosion of mountains, and the bending of light. Within the imagined geology of its surface, it stores these observations like time capsules.
The story is tender and melancholic. The quasi-moon watches the enduring relationship between Earth and its moon and begins to hope that somewhere in the universe, there might be a body that will love it back.
Orbit becomes a metaphor that reaches far beyond astronomy. It describes emotional gravity, inherited patterns, and psychic repetition. We orbit families, memories, institutions, and histories, even when we believe we have moved beyond them. This work traces the possibility of altering such patterns, not through abrupt escape but through gradual recalibration. A trajectory bends slowly; a life begins to move otherwise.”
Full essay can be read here.
Support
This
exhibition is supported in part by 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. All video documentation was done by Matthew Thomas Ross.