Australia Museum Exhibits Works By Simryn Gill

Running throughout 22 March 2009, Simryn Gill: Gathering includes photography, objects, collections, books and text works by this internationally renowned artist.

Born in Singapore in 1959, Gill lives and works in Sydney and Port Dickson, Malaysia. She has exhibited widely throughout Australia and internationally, including documenta 12, Kassel (2007), the Singapore Biennale (2006), the Biennale of Sydney (2002 and 2008), the Sao Paulo Biennial (2004) and the Venice Biennale (1999). Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Tate Modern, London and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC (both 2006).

The exhibition, curated by Russell Storer, explores the artist’s pursuit of meaning through materials, forms and ways of working, such as collecting, reading, archiving, arranging, casting and photographing.

Gill’s practice considers how we might experience place as an intersection of personal and collective histories and geographies. In making the photographic work May 2006, for example, the artist took more than 800 photographs over a month of walks around her neighbourhood, using a roll of film a day. The film stock had recently been discontinued and was nearing its expiry date; Gill’s work recorded the passing of a particular material as well as documented the artist’s deepening connection to her locality.

Another work featured in the Australia Museum Exhibits Works By Simryn Gill exhibition, Run (2006), is a series of photographs recording Gill’s visit to the Indonesian island of Pulau Run. Once a centre for the lucrative nutmeg trade, the island was exchanged between the British and the Dutch for Manhattan in 1667. The photographs question how history may occupy a particular site, and the ability of photographs to capture the essence of a place.

Garland (2006) consists of objects collected on the beaches of Port Dickson and islands off Singapore over a number of years. Having been reshaped by the sea and sand, the objects take on almost organic forms as they become part of the local beachscape. Placed on the floor of the gallery, the work encourages visitors to hold, touch, and rearrange the fragments, inviting new processes of transformation and discovery.

The exhibition also features two of Gill’s book-based works, Untitled (2006) and 32 Volumes (2006). Untitled features a specific if eclectic collection of books from which numerous words have been torn out and collected together, raising questions about the shifting contexts of the English language and the fluidity of meaning. 32 Volumes features a complete set of the Time-Life World Library series from the 1960s, in which the artist has removed all of the text, leaving only the photographs, focusing our attention on how images have been used to represent the world, as well as encouraging different readings of them.

The exhibition also features a selection of books, sketches, collections and experimental pieces from the early 1990s to the present, some produced for exhibitions and others never intended as art works. Together, they offer an insight into Gill’s artistic processes and her interest in art-making as an active engagement with the world.

The artist’s ongoing artistic project Pearls will be the focus of a number of Australia Museum Exhibits Works By Simryn Gill public programs. For this work the artist invites friends and colleagues to provide her with a book of personal value which she then transforms into beads and returns to the owner as a gift.

A book, co-published by the Australia Museum Exhibits Works By Simryn Gill and Walther Konig, will accompany the exhibition. This is the first major monograph to be produced on the artist’s work, and extends the discussion of Gill’s practice beyond the scope of this exhibition. The book features a rich selection of images from the early 1990s to the present, as well as essays by Tate Modern curator Jessica Morgan, renowned anthropologist Michael Taussig, and exhibition curator Russell Storer. -- www.mca.com.au