A solo exhibition of my new work “Interventions”, part of my broader “One Day We’ll Understand” project, opened 4 July 2021 at the Les Rencontres d’Arles. Curated by Sam I-shan. The exhibition is installed in the Abbaye de Montmajour, a Benedictine monastery from the 10th century. https://www.rencontres-arles.com/en/expositions/view/1032/sim-chi-yin
A review essay on the show, by British writer/curator/scholar Max Houghton, has been published: https://www.magnumphotos.com/arts-culture/emerging-fragments-sim-chi-yin-one-day-well-understand/
Sim Chi Yin
One Day We’ll Understand
Exhibition Curator: Sam I-shan
Sim Chi Yin’s One Day We’ll Understand (2015-ongoing) contests historiographies of the Malayan Emergency (1948-1960), where jungles, plantations and villages became battlegrounds for anti-colonial fighters, and British and Commonwealth troops. British Malaya consisted of the Malay Peninsula and Singapore, and was a key global source of rubber and tin. It remained strategically important for the colonial British till independence in 1957 and the formation of Malaysia in 1963. One of the early hot conflicts in the global Cold War, and cast as an exemplary counter-insurgency, Malaya was also where population-control strategies and the use of Agent Orange were pioneered and later used in the Vietnam War.
For Interventions, shown for the first time, Sim combed the British Imperial War Museum’s archive, photographing prints and negatives to merge verso and recto into one plane. This in-camera process caused usually-hidden marks and labels to appear with images on the front, forming new mise en scènes that reveal mechanisms of meaning in the colonial archive. Used by the authorities for media campaigns and psychological warfare, the original images juxtaposed the dual euphemisms of the “Emergency” and “banditry” to support state military operations against anti-colonial struggles. Sim’s transformations question the indexicality of material evidence used to understand the past and present.
Sim introduces further perspectives of the anti-colonial left with two other series: Remnants features present-day landscapes of former sites of conflict in Malaysia and Thailand that still retain traces of war. Requiem is a video installation where former deportees and exiles living across China, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia reclaim memories of their political participation in their own voice, performing revolutionary songs “Goodbye Malaya” and “The Internationale”.
Sim’s assemblage of suppressed histories, personal narratives, private collections and altered sites form a counter-archive to the colonial and postcolonial states’ account of the war. Her multi-part project is as much memory work as it is an act of resistance.
Installation views:
Installation views of Sim Chi Yin’s solo exhibition “One Day We’ll Understand” at Les Rencontres d’Arles, installed at the 10th century former Benedictine monastery, Abbaye de Montmajour. 8 July 2021.
