Four artworks from Sim Chi Yin's series"The suitcase is a little bit rotten" will be on display in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Programme studio exhibition this spring. They were commissioned by Autograph in 2022 for our project Critical Times: Dialogues in Contemporary Photography.
Intervening with an archive of magic lantern slides from the early 1900s as precarious sites of re-imagining and photographic time travel, Chi Yin creates a fantastical time-space visual repertoire, a palimpsest of childhood, trauma, futurity and the long legacies of colonial violence.
Sim Chi Yin created new work for Autograph, speculating on the potentialities of transgenerational memory and inheritance
See more
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.
Images on page: All images by Sim Chi Yin, from the series “The suitcase is a little bit rotten”, commissioned by Autograph for Critical Times: Dialogues in Contemporary Photography (2022), supported by the Bagri Foundation. Banner image and View the Commission: [detail]
About the artist: Sim Chi Yin. Photo: Joel Low.
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.