An installation of photographic prints and a newly-created VR piece, ‘The Garden Of No Return”, from my “Shifting Sands” project is on view at the Gropius Bau Berlin till August 2023.
Indigo Waves and Other Stories
Re-Navigating the Afrasian Sea and Notions of Diaspora
6 April to 13 August 2023
Taking the stories and histories of the Indian Ocean as its departure point, the group exhibition Indigo Waves and Other Stories: Re-Navigating the Afrasian Sea and Notions of Diaspora investigates the links between the continents of Africa and Asia.
Sim Chi Yin
“The world is running out of sand. It seems counter-intuitive but sand, besides air and water, is our most used commodity”, reflects Sim Chi Yin. In the adjacent room, her photographic installation and VR narrative chronicles the movement and depletion of this non-renewable resource from Vietnam’s Mekong Delta and across Asia (in particular China, Malaysia and Singapore) through a desire for frenzied urbanisation, the development of new metropolitan areas and a constant drive for land reclamation that transforms coastlines. The transit of sand piles across rivers, into container ships and storage sites in construction areas, is often plotted by Sim through aerial imaging. This approach creates a different scalar and spatial perspective from which to comprehend mining and trading processes. The newly-produced work Garden of No Return (2023) weaves together lullabies and laments as well as poetry written and narrated by Vietnamese writer Khải Đơn to grapple with detrimental effects of landslides and large-scale erosion which destroys homes, livestock and ancestral shrines. Sim Chi Yin, together with Dan Archer, creates an experiential terrain that uses photogrammetry imagery and filmed sequences while also allowing for leaps into the poetic and uncanny to allude to communal losses and extreme precarity in the global business flows of sand mining.
.
Installation views by Chroma, Luca Girardini and Sim Chi Yin