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Simryn Gill
Born in 1959 in Singapore / Lives in Sydney, Australia

Adriano Pedrosa (AP): What is your relationship with Angkor?

Simryn Gill (SG): I know about the ruins of the temple complex, Angkor, from photographs, but I have never been to Cambodia. The ruins, in the photographs, are beautiful—perfect, one might say, especially in the way that trees have merged with the stone structures. The drooping branches echo the limbs and torsos of the statues that seem to litter the site. In the early 1980s I worked at a regional development agency in Kuala Lumpur, and I remember conversations about how heads severed from Angkor statues were being smuggled to Bangkok and then further away in the luggage of international diplomats who were, at the time, immune from customs checks.

AP: What is the history of the houses in your photographs?

SG: This estate of perhaps 65 houses was started in the mid-1980s in the seaside town of Port Dickson, about an hour’s drive south of Kuala Lumpur. These houses seem to have been fully constructed, but never occupied. I‘ve never found out the exact reason for this. Perhaps the developer wasn’t willing to pay the necessary corruption money to get the final paperwork, or fell out of favor with local authorities.

AP: There is a strong reference to geometric abstraction in the photographs.

SG: The photographs are of windowpanes that were left leaning against walls by thieves after they’d stolen the aluminum frames to sell to the then-booming scrap metal market. I found them this way in 2007 when I took a friend to see the estate— I’ve been going there for many years. He pointed out to me how much the panes of glass looked like some abandoned installation of modernist artworks. It was as if we had made an archaeological discovery of an ancient modernist site. I photographed them with this idea in my mind, and chose black and white to emphasize the geometry and the tones of smoky glass against the white walls and rectangular window holes. A great deal of geometric abstraction has, for me, that Angkor-like quality of being breathtakingly and unattainably beautiful. Like the temples of Angkor, I mostly know these paintings and collages of the early 20th century through photographs in books. For me they are mysterious, and mythical. Emptiness and stillness as idea and form is something I look at and think about a lot, but perhaps the things I do are quite the opposite.

AP: Is there a political dimension to the work?  

SG: You asked me about Angkor, the unoccupied houses, geometric abstraction. My reasons for making the work are various and perhaps messy, including the beauty of the light and the glass, and my pleasure in my discovery. They will be viewed as formal abstractions or documentary records, and many shades in between. How I understand the pictures seems to have grown denser and less straightforward since I made them. Just recently I remembered the conversations about the smuggling of Angkor heads, something I hadn’t thought about for years.