Simryn Gill

To complement her new project at Tate Modern, ALBION will be exhibiting three series of photographs by Malaysian artist, Simryn Gill. These three works were conceived as parts of a single project and will be shown together for the first time. Made between 2001 and 2004, these photographs, as with many of her other works, question the coherence of systems that we create to ‘know’ the world around us.

Dalam (2001), made up of 260 photographs, was taken over a two-month period when the artist entered into the living spaces of homes across peninsular Malaysia. The photographs record a range of interiors from the very humble to the opulent, from the spartan to the ornate. The work was made by Gill initially asking friends and their friends, whether she could photograph their homes, and eventually, and for the most part, knocking on strangers’ doors to ask permission to do the same. ‘Dalam’ - meaning ‘inside’, ‘interior’, ‘deep’ in Malay - is the result of a network of connections, formed through chance, accident and planning. The large series, shown in a long horizontal grid, depicts the interiors of homes across the country, and, in so doing asks a question about whether it is possible to ‘see inside’ a nation.

Standing Still (2000 – 03) was made in response to the large numbers of ambitious development projects in Southeast Asia, which were abandoned before completion after the economic crisis of 1997 and which are decaying slowly over time. The 114 photographs that make up the series are of these incomplete buildings, as well as previously occupied abandoned buildings from earlier periods. Kate Bush wrote about Standing Still in ArtForum in 2003: “Gill’s photographs….neither nostalgic, nor forward looking sandwich two moments in time to suggest a third: a hesitant stumbling present locked between an irretrievable past and an arrested future.”

The third series of photographs, Power Station (2004), the smallest and most intimate of the three, comprises 13 pairs of images which record the inner rooms of two neighbouring buildings in the small Malaysian seaside town of Port Dickson: a de-commissioned power station and old bungalow. The two interiors are photographed on different film: colour for the industrial space and black and white for the domestic. The result is both optimistic and wistful, full of the signs of progress and yet clearly from the past.

Gill was born in Singapore in 1959 and now lives and works in Sydney. She has exhibited internationally in a series of solo and group exhibitions.

Simryn Gill will be exhibiting at Tate Modern, level 2, from the 16 March – 7 May 2006.

Pressetext

Simryn Gill

gleichzeitige Ausstellungen:
21.03.06 - 12.05.06 Albion Gallery, London
18.03.06 - 07.05.06 Tate Modern, London