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Artist Sim Chi Yin has created new work for Autograph's commissioning project Critical Times: Dialogues in Contemporary Photography, speculating on the potentialities of transgenerational memory and inheritance
Autograph invited Sim Chi Yin to create a new series of work responding to critical geopolitics – past, present, future – of our time through photography. “The suitcase is a little bit rotten” is a conceptual series of work using new and found imagery to speculate on the potentialities of transgenerational memory and inheritance, between the artist’s socialist grandfather – a political activist in British Malaya executed for his politics during the Cold War – and her son born in London at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, and who resurrects a trace of his forgotten great-grandfather not least through the name he was given.
Intervening with an archive of magic lantern slides from the early 1900s as precarious sites of re-imagining and photographic time travel, the artist creates a fantastical time-space visual repertoire, a palimpsest of childhood, trauma, futurity and the long legacies of colonial violence.
Chi Yin is one of three artists jointly selected in collaboration with the Bagri Foundation, a non-profit supporting and promoting Asian arts, to create new work for Autograph's commissioning project Critical Times: Dialogues in Contemporary 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.
Autograph is a place to see things differently. Since 1988, we have championed photography that explores issues of race, identity, representation, human rights and social justice, sharing how photographs reflect lived experiences and shape our understanding of ourselves and others.
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