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Simryn Gill / Malaysia 1959 / Dalam 2001 / Type C photograph on paper / 260 sheets: 32.5 x 31.2cm (each) / The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased 2003 with funds from The Myer Foundation, a project of the Sidney Myer Centenary Celebration 1899-1999, through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / © The artist
Simryn GillDalam 2001
Not Currently on Display
Dalam is a series of 260 colour photographs of the common living areas of homes from across Malaysia. The title of the work, Dalam, is a Malay word which means ‘deep’, ‘inside’ or ‘interior’. On a slow journey over the two months of June and July in 2001 Simryn Gill journeyed across Malaysia in a trip which the artist described as a way to see what constitutes a nation.
How then does one think of the interiors of these pictures as Malaysian? To raise questions is deeply characteristic of much of Gill’s practice. She often approaches large complex issues, such as exploring notions of identity, by posing a series of questions to herself, and she uses the process of making her works to unravel the complexities that are inherent to her quest. ‘Dalam’ was the result of two questions. ‘What does the “inside” of a place look like? Do many people held together by geography add up to the idea of a nation or single unified group?’1 The array of interior views of the homes that Gill entered was her methodology of addressing these questions.
Endnotes:
1. Zuckerman Jacobson, Heidi. ‘Dalam’, in ‘Simryn Gill: Selected work’. AGNSW, Sydney, 2002, p.19
The work of Simryn Gill considers questions of place and history, and how they might intersect with personal and collective experience. Born in Singapore in 1959, Gill lives in Sydney and Port Dickson, Malaysia.
Using objects, language and photographs, her work conveys a deep interest in material culture and in the ways that meaning can transform and translate into different contexts. Through the reinterpretation or alteration of existing objects, the photographing of specific locations and the forming of collections, Gill contemplates how ideas and meanings are communicated between people, objects and sites.