Sim Chi Yin Makes Australian Premiere at Footscray Community Arts

Footscray Community Arts and Asia TOPA will present the Australian premiere of the new multimedia performance from Berlin-based, Singaporean artist Sim Chi Yin. The performance of One Day We’ll Understand at Footscray Community Arts from 27 February – 1 March explores memory and transgenerational inheritance through Sim’s compelling family history. A companion work, Chronotopia, Sim’s first solo exhibition in Australia, will be held at the Roslyn Smorgon Gallery from 4 February-22 March.
 
Sim’s 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.
 
Set against the Malayan Emergency, One Day We’ll Understand is part-documentary and part-speculative, examining how we contend with the past and the future. Through the lens of Sim’s life and camera, we time travel into her family archive, recovering traces left in the wake of the anti-colonial war in British Malaya and beyond. The work combines haunting imagery with narration, archival footage and a driving live score by percussionist Cheryl Ong, to depict Sim’s multiple personas as artist, historian, writer, mother and granddaughter. The work has been developed with a Singaporean-Australian creative team, under the direction of Chamber Made Artistic Director Tamara Saulwick, with video design by Nick Roux, and dramaturgy by Kok Heng Leun.
 
One Day We’ll Understand had its world premiere in August 2024 in Singapore at the Esplanade - Theatres on the Bay.
 
The works in Chronotopia raise questions of transgenerational inheritance by positing connections across geographies, reappropriating 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 South-East Asia. Time and space are 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 great-grandfather’s 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.
 
The Chronotopia exhibition opens on 4 February with a launch event on 22 February. Four performances of One Day We’ll Understand will be held in the Performance Space at Footscray Community Arts from Thursday 27 February to Saturday 1 March, with Chi Yin hosting an Artist Talk on Friday 28 February.
 
Sim Chi Yin, who is based in Berlin, has exhibited at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024) and at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2024); 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 has a PhD in War Studies from King’s College London.