Family photos on archival table, artist’s collection
Schöneberg, Berlin, 2021/2024
Bornholmer Straße, Berlin, 2024
Site specific participatory installation, postcards

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Sim Chi Yin tells the story of Loo Ngan Yue, her grandmother, who was made a widow by Britain’s violent suppression of anti-colonial forces in Malaya – a conflict that lasted twelve years and later served as a template  for Western counter-insurgency campaigns both historical and contem- porary. Sim’s paternal grandfather, a journalist and left-wing intellectual,  was – along with many other Socialists and their sympathetisers – impri- soned by the British and deported to China, where he was then executed  by the anti-communist Nationalist Army (Kuomintang). Sim juxtaposes mo- ments of leisure with oral histories of her family‘s inter-generational trau- ma, using photographic means to create a cinematic experience. Against  the background of the “Malayan Emergency” (1948–1960), Sim draws a  picture of fear, loss, flashes of joy as well as familial and historical amne- sia – and therewith points to the unhealed wounds of the Cold War, which  deepened the cleft between different segments of the population and led to enduring conflicts, whose repercussions we continue to feel today.