Chronotopia

Chronotopia is a specially-curated exhibition of works by Sim Chi Yin to accompany the performance of One Day We’ll Understand at Asia TOPA. 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 South-East 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.

2025 Roslyn Smorgon Gallery, Footscray Community Arts, Australia, as part of Asia TOPA [4 February - 22 March]