A Small Town at the Turn of the Century

Overview

A Small Town at the Turn of the Century is a series of 39 type C photographs that were taken by Simryn Gill in Port Dickson in Malaysia, the town where she grew up. Two of the photographs from this series were exhibited in Sharjah Biennial 9.

As the title of the series suggests, the photographs were taken at a significant moment: the turn from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. The images capture local people in local places, however each scene takes on a surreal and humorous twist – the faces in these photographs are hidden by tropical fruit. Watermelons, bunches of bananas and pineapples become substitutes for heads.

In A Small Town at the Turn of the Century, Gill uses photography for a familiar and traditional purpose - to capture portraits of people at a significant moment in time. The work affectionately documents a personal history of her hometown. However, the work also throws into question our approach to marking moments and memories that are important to us.

The personal details that may make each of these images unique are comically discredited. The faceless people become impersonal ciphers of memory; like classified fruit, each person becomes a ‘type’ of memory. Gill’s photographs recognise our struggle to preserve memories in their purest form and humorously demonstrate the shortcomings of our cultural traditions in this regard.

This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 9