Site Lines- organised as a part of residency via Khoj and PICA

To remember

To hold

To carefully acknowledge 

Ayesha Singh, Cross Hatchings artist-in-residence from New Delhi, India, invites you to Studio 2 at PICA for a congregation of lines, movement, words and tea. During her residency, Singh has been researching Perth’s colonial alterations, urbanisation, legal restrictions, in relation to resultant architectural facades and ornamentation, along with personal anecdotes from historians, artists, urban-planners and cultural practitioners. Studio 2 will contain parts of her research and an ongoing exploration into encounters – the seepage of memory, context and histories we carry as individuals.

Written and conceptualised in conversation with Jyothidas K.V.

We carefully move the hand of history,

Shift the center

Of maritime and mines 

What is unique to the sailor?

Preferred perspective precisely prescribed

Destined erasure

Why repeat the definition of an Empire?

Of fictional fact

Of the longest relationship to the land

To carefully acknowledge the arrival of shipfulls of my people

With skin branded as afghans

In history to be re-written, to re-narrativise, to resist

There once was a land full of laughing trees

The haunted school, ghosts of students past, 

And raven craws,

When the presence of totems is announced

And the building asks you to leave.

Just leave.

Images courtesy 

PICA and photographer Tristan Miller