My Own Private Angkor

Simryn Gill is a visual artist who works across a number of different mediums that includes photography, drawing, and sculpture. Born in Singapore, Gill has lived since then in India, the U.K. and now divides her time between Port Dickson in Malaysia and Sydney, Australia. My Own Private Angkor synthesizes a number of the concerns that preoccupy Gill’s practice as an artist. The work is composed of 90 black and white silver gelatin prints that were shot by Gill inside some abandoned neo-Tudor beachside holiday homes near Port Dickson. The images document the aftermath of these buildings having being raided for their metal fixtures, particularly the aluminum channels for large glass windows, as commodity values rose with the economic rise taking place in China and India in the 1990s.

Each individual image documents configurations of various panes of glass that are resting against walls and empty balconies of these abandoned buildings. The images are taken with precision and rigor, the camera mostly placed low to the ground. In most images sunlight passes through these arrangements of glass panes, casting shadows on to the debris-filled floors, and walls full of creeping plants, creating remarkable geometries, exuding a graphic formalism that resonates with a range of Western Minimalist sculpture.

My Own Private Angkor is amongst Gill’s most affective and grand statements in capturing the ruins of modernity across peninsular Malaysia. The images are suggestive of a history gone by, of times lived and ended. While the series so affectively captures the material entropy of these neo Tudor developments, Gill’s commitment to using analog photography suggests a complimentary materialist and formal intent, in and how photographs themselves are made from light and exposure. Gill employs seriality as a formal tool, to intimate a sense of incompleteness and transience. Furthermore, the title of the piece refers to famous twelfth century Hindu temple complex in Cambodia, Angkor Wat, while emphasizes that this grouping of images forms an archaeology that is of Gill’s own making. My Own Private Angkor is a quiet, elegiac and finally a very moving statement on how the coalescing of the personal, historical and socio-economic can be found in something as simple and ephemeral as group of shadows.