We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art stands and recognise the creative contribution First Australians make to the art and culture of this country.
Simryn Gill / Malaysia b.1959 / Pooja/Loot (detail) 1992 / Found objects in books / 60 components ranging from 15.5 x 11 x 2cm to 23 x 35.6 x 4.5cm; installed size variable / Gift of the artist through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2003. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Simryn Gill
Simryn GillPooja/Loot 1992
Not Currently on Display
Simryn Gill’s personal history of shifting between different geographies, cultures and languages has deeply influenced the development of her artistic practice. Pooja/Loot is an early work created when Gill was newly arrived in Australia and living in Adelaide, constructed from found objects and books she collected while trawling the op shops of a culturally diverse city with a high proportion of ethnic minorities.
The installation consists of 58 novel-sized, early-twentieth-century books, into which the artist has carved various shrine-shaped pockets or crevices. These are book-ended by two open pages from a nineteenth-century dictionary of Anglo-Indian colloquial words and phrases: the words forming the title of the work — ‘pooja’ and ‘loot’ — appear on these pages. Translated from Hindi to mean ‘worship’ and ‘plunder’, they suggest the potentially fraught histories of the books and objects, and the process of their acquisition.
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.