Simryn Gill

Born 1959, Singapore. Lives in Sydney, Australia

Garland consists of hundreds of objects Gill has collected over fifteen years from the beaches of Malaysia and islands off southern Singapore. Yet only recently have thay been brought together and categorised collectively as an artwork - a status achieved only by displacing the collection from its original context. The materials are presented on a table surrounded by stools on which the viewer sites. Individually the objects demand a peculiar kind of categorisation: deeply worn by wind and sea, they can seldom be defined by their original state or function. The human-made and the natual have become interchangeable.

Solo Exhibitions

2006 Simryn Gill, Level Two Gallery, Tate Modern, London, UK

2004 Power Station, Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo
Matrix 210: Standing Still, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA, USA
 
2002 Simryn Gill: Selected Work, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

2001 Dalam, Galeri Petronas, Kuala Lumpur

2000 Roadkill, Project Gallery, CCA Kitakyushu, Japan

Group Exhibitions

2004 XXVI Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

2003 After Image: Simryn Gill, Ana Mendieta, Cindy Sherman, Francesca Woodman, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland

2002 Your Place or Mine? Fiona Foley & Simryn Gill, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia
The Biennale of Sydney, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia 

2000 Flight Patterns, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Delicate Balance: Six Routes to the Himalayas (with Liisa Roberts), Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland 

Artist’s Texts

2005 ‘Pearls: Kuala Lumpur, July 2005’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 6.4 

2004 Standing Still, Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König

2000 A Small Town at the Turn of the Century, Kitakyushu: Centre for Contemporary Art

Further Reading

Ken Bolton, ‘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 Realities, 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)