My series of glass works The Suitcase Is A Little Bit Rotten and two-channel film The Mountain That Hid are in a group exhibition “Double Exposure” at Camera Austria in Graz.
Curatorial text by Anna Voswinckel:
The examination of the complex, transnational political entanglements of colonialism and its traumatic effects on (family) biographies forms the starting point of Sim Chi Yin ‘s multimedia practice. Triggered by research into her grandfather, who was deported to China by the British colonial authorities in 1949 and murdered there, the artist researched the Malaysian Anti-Colonial War (1948–1960) for over ten years. The story of deportation and the complex diaspora movement between China and Southeast Asia are interwoven in the two-channel film The Mountain That Hid (2022). The Suitcase Is A Little Bit Rotten (2023) is an artistic intervention in a colonial image archive. The artist used Laterna Magica glass slides she found from the late 18th and early 19th centuries, which were used to advertise the colony of Malaya in the British Kingdom, as the basis for her work. By inserting her grandfather and her child into the glass slides as barely perceptible details, Sim subjectivizes the objectifying gaze inherent in colonial projection and expands the photographically mediated cross-generational process of memory work.
Double Exposure – Camera Austria
Das aus dem Feld der analogen Fotografie entlehnte Bild der Doppelbelichtung dient im Kontext der Ausstellung Double Exposure als Metapher für erinnerungspolitische Prozesse, die, ausgehend von zufälligen Bildfunden oder gezielten Archivsichtungen, untersucht und transformiert werden. Was bedeutet es, sich einer Einschreibung nochmals auszusetzen? Vier sehr unterschiedliche künstlerische Praxen werden vor- und einander gegenübergestellt.