Sim Chi Yin's video work Requiem is being shown in the main exhibition of the 60th La Biennale di Venezia, as part of the Disobedience Archive curated by Marco Scotini. 

Requiem depicts now-elderly former communists reclaiming memories of their political participation, war, deportation, exile and socialist dreams, in the form of song. In their youth, they were guerilla fighters who took on the British in the jungles of Malaya (present-day Malaysia and Singapore) in the anti-colonial war of 1948-1960. In poignant moments, the veterans struggle to remember lines from the global socialist anthem they sang daily 70 years ago, the Internationale — which their death row comrades had sang in defiance as they were marched to the noose to be hanged. Goodbye Malaya, composed and scored by a pair of Malayan communists in 1941, was belted out en masse on the decks of the ship as the leftists were deported from their home land, and in many cases, country of birth. Over 30,000 Malayan leftists — including the artist’s paternal grandfather — were deported by the British to China during the so-called “Malayan Emergency” (1948-1960), a war that followed Britain’s rule in Palestine and preceded America’s war in Vietnam in important ways. Their stories are largely missing in the historiography of this war — the longest the British fought post-World War II. Like memory itself, their voices are sometimes fragile, fallible, but also resilient. 

The Disobedience Archive is a 20-year project by Scotini, examining the relationship between artistic practices and activism. Showing this group exhibition at the Venice Biennale for the first time, this latest iteration includes works by 39 artists and collectives, including Hito Steryl and Black Audio Film Collective. Taking up a whole room in the Arsenale, the archive is installed as a zoetrope, in a design by Juliana Ziebell.

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Image: Sim Chi Yin, ''One Day We'll Understand'': Requiem / Internationale, Goodbye Malaya, 2017
(still from the video)