CHI YIN SIM, THE SUITCASE IS A LITTLE BIT ROTTEN, 2023
UV print on glass, light box, replica vintage stand
“Autograph invited Sim Chi Yin to create a new series of work responding to critical geopolitics – past, present, future – of our time through photography. “The suitcase is a little bit rotten” is a conceptual series of work using new and found imagery to speculate on the potentialities of transgenerational memory and inheritance, between the artist’s socialist grandfather – a political activist in British Malaya executed for his politics during the Cold War – and her son born in London at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, and who resurrects a trace of his forgotten great-grandfather not least through the name he was given.
Intervening with an archive of magic lantern slides from the early 1900s as precarious sites of re-imagining and photographic time travel, the artist creates a fantastical time-space visual repertoire, a palimpsest of childhood, trauma, futurity and the long legacies of colonial violence.” - Autograph