Reappropriating antique Magic Lantern slides and 1960s stereoscopic reels, and remixing them with colonial archives and her own photography, this new video works conjures a different cosmos and an imaginary historical Southeast Asia to contemplate trans- generational memory and inheritance. 

Sim maps her family history onto the geopolitical, the speculative onto the evidential, making an intervention in the contested memory of the “Malayan Emergency,” the twelve- year anti-colonial war (1948–60) in today’s Malaysia and Singapore that is a missing chapter of Cold War and British empire history in the global memory discourse. Into the already- fabulist space of colonial slide projection, Sim teleports her paternal grandfather – a Malayan anti-colonial activist arrested and deported by the British who was eventually executed in China in 1949 – and her toddler son, time-traveling these two characters linked by blood and by name. 

In this film, she alludes to some of the little-known violent British practices in the Malayan war, including beheadings, post-mortem photography, and the mass deportation of over 30,000 ethnic Chinese from Malaya to China – threading it through a history of colonial photographic apparatus. The lasting consequences of migration and resistance echo between past and future, opening up possibilities of writing new historiographies in the present.