Picturing Relations: Simryn Gill & Tino Djumini

Date: 11 May to 15 July 2007

Venue: NUS Museum
Free Admission

As a means of story telling, photography enables the framing of selective views of reality and also reveals how a ‘true’ picture of reality may be negotiated. The works of Simryn Gill and Tino Djumini stimulate us to rethink our concepts spaces and domesticity in relation to various aspects such as socio-cultural identities, history and memory. Both artists’ practices have been shaped through the experiences of migration and diaspora. Gill presents an ‘objective survey’ of human conditions of Malaysians through the construct of the living rooms of 258 homes. Djumini’s portraits of ‘ordinary’ Indonesian families from a range of social classes signify a sense of shelter and institution.

Simryn Gill, born in Singapore, brought up in Malaysia, and now lives in Australia, is known as havingconsistently worked on the questions of identity and rootedness. Tino Djumini is of Indonesian descent and adopted as a child by Dutch couple. As a photographer, he returned to Indonesia to retrace his Indonesian origins and through his black & white series of works on families (working and the middle-class, posing in front of their homes), engender reflections of self the notion of 'fate' (takdir).

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