Events
Exhibitions
Chronotopia
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The Suitcase Is A Little Bit Rotten, 2023
Exhibitions
BOOK NOWChronotopia
Exhibition Date: 4 February—22 March 2025
Launch Date: 22 February 2025, 2—4pm
Event Information
Does history move in a line, or in circles? Can we remake the past we inherit, before handing it on? Are memories and trauma inscribed in our bodies passed on generationally?
Chronotopia is a specifically-curated exhibition accompanying Sim Chi Yin’s Asia TOPA performance, One Day We’ll Understand. The works in Chronotopia raise questions of trans-generational inheritance by positing connections across geographies, using speculative methods of “critical fabulation” to interrupt the archive. Sim’s works reappropriate 19th and 20th century Magic Lantern slides — once used for scientific, colonial or Christian missionary lectures and projections — to conjure an imaginary landscape melding the cosmos and historical Southeast Asia.
In these works, time and space is suspended as Sim teleports her grandfather, who was executed for his socialist politics during the Cold War, into the same realm as her toddler son, who inherited his name. In a sort of time travel through the archives, a colonial-era train tunnel appears to traverse decades of family histories, forming a chronotope of space-time, and opening a portal into questions of memory and time, death and birth, and fate and choice.
Curatorial consultancy by Sam I-shan, exhibition design by Benjamin Bannan, produced with assistance of Chamber Made and CultureLink Singapore
Chronotopia is a specifically-curated exhibition accompanying Sim Chi Yin’s Asia TOPA performance, One Day We’ll Understand.
Exhibition Date: 4 February—22 March 2025
Launch Date: 22 February 2025, 2—4pm
Presented by Footscray Community Arts and Asia TOPA, and Arts Centre Melbourne
Date & Times
- When
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Tuesday 4 February 2:00 pm
Saturday 22 March 4:00 pm
- Venue
- Roslyn Smorgon Gallery
- Cost
Accessibility
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Meet the Artist
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Sim Chi Yin
Sim Chi Yin is an artist from Singapore whose research-based practice uses artistic and archival interventions to contest and complicate historiographies and colonial narratives. She works across photography, film, installation, performance and book-making.
She has exhibited at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024) and at the Gropius Bau, Berlin (2023); the Barbican, London (2023); Camera Austria, Graz (2024); Harvard Art Museums, Boston, USA (2021); Les Rencontres d’Arles, France (2021); Nobel Peace Museum, Oslo (2017), Datsuijo, Tokyo (2024); Arko Art Centre, Seoul (2016); Zilberman Gallery Berlin (2021); Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong (2019). She has also participated in the Istanbul Biennale (2022, 2017) and the Guangzhou Image Triennial (2021). Her work is in the collections of The J. Paul Getty Museum, Harvard Art Museums, M+ Hong Kong, the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, Singapore Art Museum, and the National Museum Singapore. She was an artist fellow in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program (2022-3) and is completing a PhD at King’s College London.
