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.
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.