Simryn Gill: Gathering
20 December 2008 – 22 March 2009
West Circular Quay,
Sydney, Australia
The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) presents a solo exhibition by the Sydney-based Malaysian artist Simryn Gill. Simryn Gill: Gathering features new works and selected pieces from the past four years.
Gill’s work conveys a deep interest in material culture and in the ways that meaning can transform and translate in different contexts, through her experiments with materials, forms and methods of working, such as collecting, reading, archiving, arranging, casting and photographing.
The exhibition, curated by Russell Storer, includes recent photographic works such as May 2006, a series of more than 800 images Gill took over a month of walks around her Sydney neighbourhood, and Run, which records her visit to the Indonesian island of Pulau Run, once a centre of the spice trade; the book-based installations Untitled and 32 Volumes; and Garland, a floor-based work comprising objects collected from beaches in Malaysia and Singapore over more than a decade. Also featured are two new works, My own private Angkor, a suite of photographs taken in Port Dickson, Malaysia, and Inside, bronze sculptures cast from drought cracks in rural Australia.
Alongside these works, Gathering features a selection of books, sketches, collections and experimental pieces from the early 1990s to the present, offering an insight into Gill’s artistic processes and art-making as a way of active engagement with the world.
A book, co-published by the MCA and Walther König, will accompany the exhibition. This is the first major monograph to be produced on the artist’s work, and 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.
Born in Singapore in 1959, Simryn Gill lives in Sydney, Australia and Port Dickson, Malaysia. She has exhibited widely internationally, most recently at the Biennale of Sydney (2002 and 2008), documenta 12, Kassel (2007), and the Singapore Biennale (2006), as well as solo projects at the Tate Modern, London, the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington DC (all 2006).
This exhibition is supported by the Turnbull Foundation & the Gordon Darling Foundation.
