Zilberman | Berlin is delighted to announce the solo exhibition One Day We’ll Understand by the artist Sim Chi Yin.

Sim’s exhibition One Day We’ll Understand questions the colonial and postcolonial histories and historiographies of the 12-year guerrilla war in British Malaya (an area today covered by Malaysia and Singapore), which the British colonial power euphemistically termed the ‘Malayan Emergency’ (1948–1960). Communists, who had led the resistance against Japan in World War II, now spearheaded the anti-colonial struggle. It was one of the early hot conflicts in the global Cold War, using tactics such as population-control strategies and the defoliant chemical Agent Orange years before the Vietnam War. British authorities tried to break the resistance through detentions, deportations, and the resettlement of civilians from the edges of the jungle to so-called ‘New Villages’ to starve the communist insurgents of supplies of food, medicine and men.

Text: Lotte Laub
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Accompanying the exhibition, a catalogue featuring essays by Sam I-shan and Anthony Downey, a conversation between Sim Chi Yin and Hilary Roberts, and an introduction by Lotte Laub will be published.

On the occasion of the opening, Sim Chi Yin and Maaza Mengiste, 2020 Booker Prize finalist for the novel The Shadow King, will be in conversation about Sim’s work One Day We’ll Understand, her photo book She Never Rode That Trishaw Again, and the intersections of colonial and vernacular archives, narratives and memory discourses.

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Open during Berlin Art Week 2021