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Using the archive to muse on the possibilities of transgenerational memory
The suitcase is a little bit rotten consists of 12 glass lantern slides from the late 1800s and early 1900s. Depicting scenes and landscapes from colonial era British Malaya (now Malaysia) and southeast Asia, artist Sim Chi Yin has digitally altered the slides to incorporate references to both her socialist grandfather – a political activist executed for his politics during the Cold War (1948-1960) – and her son, born in London in 2020 at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
By delicately inserting these familial figures and blending their presence into the glass slides, Chi Yin creates a chronotopia: a 'collapsing or shifting of time and space'. Here, the archive provides a fantastical and unstable site for photographic time travel, enabling the artist to muse on issues of trauma and the long legacies of colonial violence as well as the possibilities for transgenerational memory to shape the future. As the artist explains: "I was trying to find a visual form to deal with this notion of transgenerational inheritance […] I was interested in the histories, experiences, gestures, and inclinations that a human being comes into the world with."
Autograph commissioned Chi Yin to produce this new body of work as part of Critical Times: Dialogues in Contemporary Photography, a project led in collaboration with Bagri Foundation supporting three artists to respond to the geopolitics of our time through photography.
Sim Chi Yin (born 1978, Singapore) is a research-led visual artist whose interdisciplinary practice focuses on history, conflict, migration and memory, often combining photography, moving image, archival interventions and text-based performance in her multi-layered works.
Chi Yin’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at institutions and festivals such as Zilberman Gallery, Berlin; Les Rencontres d’Arles; Landskrona Foto Festival, Sweden; Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong; Institute of Contemporary Arts, Singapore; Nobel Peace Museum, Oslo; Aesthetica Art Prize, York Art Gallery, UK; Jendela (Visual Arts Space) Gallery, Singapore; Guangzhou Image Triennial, China; 15th Istanbul Biennial, Turkey amongst others.
Her work is in the collections of The Getty, Singapore Art Museum and the National Museum of Singapore. She was commissioned as the Nobel Peace Prize photographer in 2017. Chi Yin is represented by Zilberman Gallery in Berlin and Hanart TZ Gallery in Hong Kong. She is completing a practice-based PhD at King’s College London and is currently based between New York and Berlin. You can see more of the artist's work on her website.
A new commissioning project working with three interdisciplinary, research-led visual artists from different global diasporas
Find out moreSupported by the Bagri Foundation and Autograph
Banner image: Sim Chi Yin, from the series "The suitcase is a little bit rotten” [detail], commissioned by Autograph for Critical Times: Dialogues in Contemporary Photography (2022), supported by the Bagri Foundation.
Images on page: All images by Sim Chi Yin, from the series “The suitcase is a little bit rotten” [detail], commissioned by Autograph for Critical Times: Dialogues in Contemporary Photography (2022), supported by the Bagri Foundation.
Other images on page: 1) Sim Chi Yin. Photo: Joel Low. 2) Laura El-Tantawy, from the series She Fights in the Fields - Guardians of the Land, commissioned by Autograph for Critical Times: Dialogues in Contemporary Photography (2022), supported by the Bagri Foundation.
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