Von (un)wirklichen Grenzen, (Un)Moral und anderen Überschreitungen, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) Berlin,
14.9.–8.12.2024
I’m excited to be showing ten glass works and a two-channel video installation at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures) in Berlin, in a group exhibition “Forgive Us Our Trespasses”, till 8 December 2024.
It is the first time I have been able to show a whole series of glass plates from “The Suitcase Is A Little Bit Rotten” (2022/3) and “The Mountain That Hid” (2022) as a projection — as I’d imagined. These two series of works also featured in my recent theatre performance “One Day We’ll Understand“.
With so many thanks to curator Cosmin Costinaș and Paz Guevara, and HKW director Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung!
“Forgive Us Our Trespasses” shows the works of 50 artists dealing with multiple forms of trespassing and belonging. My work specifically contemplates the trespassing of colonial archives, historiographies, generational lines and memory. It reinterpets Magic Lantern slides from the late 1800s and early 1900s and contemplates the circularity of time, history, memory and the Chinese diasapora.
From the HKW reader on the show:
Sim Chi Yin’s works formulate speculative and unresolved narrations of colonial histories that are given form through artistic research and archival interventions. One of the artist’s central preoccupations is the spectral presence of family trauma and intergenerational silence, and how history returns in an incomplete and cyclical fashion to be reconfigured and reframed by the generations that follow. The works in the exhibition draw on ten years of the artist’s video archive, presenting an unfinished story of several generations of her family overlaid with the political histories of British Malaya (present-day Malaysia and Singapore). It exposes how shifting transnational allegiances and anti-colonial struggle impacted the formation of these two states, as well as the life of her grandfather, who was deported by British colonial authorities in 1949 and subsequently executed in China. Sim’s decade-long research into the anti-colonial guerrilla war known as the Malayan Emergency (1948–60), which was fought between military forces aligned with the British Empire and communist pro- independence fighters from the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA), documents the impacts of this geopolitical tug-of-war on everyday lives, pointing to the lasting consequences of migration and resistance. The way these consequences echo between past and future are captured in Sim’s work, opening the possibility of writing new historiographies in the present.
Works in the exhibition: The Mountain That Hid (2022), 2-channel-video, sound, 5’ 56”. Courtesy of the artist; The Suitcase Is A Little Bit Rotten (2023), UV print on glass, light box, replica vintage retouching stand, dimension vary. Courtesy of the artist and Zilberman Gallery, Istanbul / Berlin / Miami.
Installation views here by Hannes Wiedemann / HKW and André Carvalho.
