| Dates: | born 1959
| | Biography: | (artist biography as of 2006)
Born 1959, Singapore. Lives in Sydney,
Australia, and Port Dickson, Malaysia
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
Simryn Gill, 2006, Level Two
Gallery, Tate Modern, London, UK
Power Station, 2004, Shiseido
Gallery, Tokyo
Matrix 210: Standing Still, 2004.
University of California, Berkeley Art
Museum, Berkeley, CA, USA
Simryn Gill: Selected Work,
2002, Art Gallery of New South Wales,
Sydney. Australia
Dalam, 2001, Galeri Petronas,
Kuala Lumpur
Roadkill, 2001, Project Gallery,
CCA Kitakyushu, Japan
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
XXVI Bienal de Sao Paulo, 2004, Sao
Paulo, Brazil
After Image: Simryn Gill, Ana
Mendieta, Cindy Sherman, Francesca
Woodman, 2003. The Fruitmarket
Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland
Simryn Gill, 2002, Institute of
Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia
The Biennale of Sydney, 2002, Museum
of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia
FlightPatterns, 2000, Museum of
Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA,
USA
Delicate Balance: Six Routes to the
Himalayas, 2000 (with Liisa
Roberts), Kiasma Museum of
Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland
ARTIST'S TEXTS
'Pearls: Kuala Lumpur, July 2005',
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 6.4
Standing Still, 2004, Cologne:
Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig
A Small Town at the Turn of the
Century, 2000, Kitakyushu: Centre
for Contemporary Art
FURTHER READING
Ken Boiton, 'Simryn Gill: A Small Town
at the Turn of the Century',
Broadsheet (Contemporary Art
Centre of South Australia), 31.4 (2002)
Kate Bush, 'Simryn Gill: Portfolio,
Artforum, February 2003
Lee Weng Choy, The Spectre of
Comparisons', Art AsiaPacific, 37
(2003)
Lee Weng Choy, 'Authenticity,
Reflexivity, and Spectacle: or, the Rise
of New Asia is Not the End of the World'
(2004), in Theory in Contemporary Art
since 1985, ed. Zoya Kocur and
Simon Leung, London: Blackwell
Publishing, 2005
Kevin Chua, 'Simryn Gill and Migration's
Capital', Art Journal (New York),
61.4 (Winter 2002)
Chaitanya Sambrani. 'Other Re-alities,
Someone Else's Fictions: The Tangled
Art of Simryn Gill', Art and
Australia 22.2 (2004)
'Simryn Gill in Conversation with
Natasha Bullock and Lily Hibberd',
Photofile 76 (Summer 2006)
| | | Source: | International 06, Liverpool Biennial exhibition catalogue | | | Date of source: | 2006 |
|
| | Description: | Gill's art is about collecting, archiving,
classifying... but she works in the way
suggested by Borges' Chinese
encyclopaedia: she defines items in a
different way, creating new, unexpected
relations. Gill troubles our comfortable
dwelling in established meanings. If
collections and archives aim to preserve
information, she uses compilation and
documentation procedures to destabilise
acquired knowledge by inventing new
ways of understanding the hybrid
dynamics of these changing times.
On the one hand, her art deals with
banal objects and situations, creating
a 'grammar of things', as Lee Weng-
Choy has put it. On the other hand, she
articulates critical reflections on
contemporary problems by using the
very environments in which our
daily life happens, thus giving her
statements a vital fibre. Directness,
subtlety and humour are combined in an
art that becomes poetic through
objectivity.
Gill's art is immediate, with no
secondary elaboration: she stays at
ground level, working directly with raw
materials to subvert them through small
twists of meaning. Foucault has
discussed the constructed relations
between words and things. In a similar
manner, Gill uses simple images as
loaded microchips capable of exploring
contradictory taxonomies of things and
the images by which we initially relate to
them.
Gerardo Mosquera
| | Description Source: | International 06, Liverpool Biennial exhibition catalogue | | Description Source Date: | 2006 | | Gender: | female | | Type: | person |
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