Credit: PICA

an imagined place (here and now)

Northeast Portland

When

Apr. 4–May 23, 2026

Days vary, Times vary

Free

Where

Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA)

15 NE Hancock St
Portland, OR 97212

The following description was submitted by the event organizer.

Exhibition On View: April 4 – May 23, 2026
Gallery Hours: Thursdays 2:00 – 8:00 PM, Fridays 12:00 – 6:00 PM, Saturdays 12:00 – 4:00 PM
⁠Opening Reception: Saturday, April 4 from 3:00 – 5:00 PM

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 was 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 planet’s orbit, 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 media and constructs offer 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.