Chronotopia

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.