Five South Asian Australian artists build memory, mythology, and queer liberation.

Chess's ancestor came back retold. Chaturanga Disclosed, Sage Godrei's speculative reworking of the game that predates chess, anchored the Transmedia Worldbuilding Residency Exhibition at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, which showed at the 4A LAB space in Haymarket, Sydney, from May 1 through June 14. The announcement for the closing artist talk is what put it on our radar.

Myra Javaid's The City of Forgotten Lights turns experiences of the gendered gaze in public space into an interactive game prototype. Sim Kaur's Jhalak / A Glimpse rebuilds a bedroom corner as a walk-in personal archive. Vidya Rajan's Good Morning Land grows a surreal landscape out of WhatsApp archives and digital memory. And Dipa Mahbuba Yasmin's Hypocrite Heaven reimagines Snakes and Ladders—a game that began life as a morality lesson—as a board of queer resistance and liberation.

The five artists—emerging South Asian Australian women and gender-diverse practitioners—spent five months in virtual labs and a Sydney intensive mentored by Antariksha Studio, the Indian transmedia collective that has been building independent games rooted in Indian heritage since 2013. The money came from Creative Australia's Create Lab Digital Alumni Fund: a national arts body funding game-form worldbuilding as visual art, with an Indian studio setting the example rather than a Western engine company.

We have a long shelf of games rewritten by people the canon overlooked—Chesh was breaking chess's rules for the people back in 2015—and a soft spot for Australia's gloriously weird game-making lineage. This residency splices the two: board-game history and engine work in the same room, retold as heritage.