One Day We’ll Understand

A new multimedia performance exploring the family history of visual artist Sim Chi Yin against the setting of the Malayan Emergency and the larger forgotten histories and legacies of empire and their impact on those left behind. Weaving micro histories with broader geopolitical stories, the work speaks across emotional and intellectual registers.

Led by an award-winning Singaporean- Australian creative team drawing on Sim’s large body of evocative photographic and filmic work, as well as her multiple persona as an image-maker, archivist/historian, writer and granddaughter, the piece is imagined as a 60 minute fully staged performance.
Expanding from her 12-min performance lecture of the same title, the new One Day We’ll Understand will combine an innovative visual environment into which is woven live narration, voiced text, and original soundscape with a live musician alongside Sim on stage.

Probing questions both personal and universal, combining documentary, speculative and fictive modes, the work transcends the autobiographical onto a larger canvas that speaks of memory, loss, resilience, restitution and repair, resonating with global  debates on decolonising histories and experiences of forced-migration past and present.