millimetre: this lunate pebble

Zarifah Ahmad Zamri (Malaysia/Saudi Arabia), Kenenza Michiko (Indonesia), Julian Udine (Philippines), Charmaine Wah (Singapore) Curated by Charmaine Wah About here we lie in folds, collected stones, [...] this lunate pebble, this splintered phalanx, I can hardly hold their sincere explosions Ossuaries, Dionne Brand (2010) this lunate pebble gathers a collection of collections within the millimetre frame. Each one memorialises an ancestral connection to land, sea and country. Zarifah collects stamps. We see sweet-sour kundang fruit, a hornbill in flight, a wind instrument sompotan made of bamboo. Together, they reflect the surviving pieces of a cultural memory and how we place our identities through our land’s histories. An accompanying short poem muses on the yearning for crop, nature and song. Kenenza collects turmeric. Earthy, peppery and bitter. Its colour—yellow—in Mandarin echoes the sound of a forgotten family surname. Out of turmeric-infused clay, she sculpted mythical fossils and a grasshopper, seen as a pest to rice paddies but innocent in its instinct to survive. Her work archives her ancestors’ story of Chinese coolies’ migration to Indonesia. The spice stains her clay, the fields, our skin. Julian collects patterns of coral skeletons. Each plaster pattern imprints a coral found during various family diving excursions. More than a memento, each mould archives the Philippines’ coasts and their changing landscape over time. They mark the hand of human intervention, rarely this gentle and careful. Charmaine collects her grandfather’s research. From the 80s to the early 2000s, Mooi Kok Chee was an agricultural researcher in Penang, Malaysia. For his granddaughter, he has left behind film slides of cabbages, broccoli, asparagus and other leafy greens. Stems and cross-sections are measured, and specimens are labelled. Vegetables are lined up in a row on tended soil. The slides recite a ritualistic labour of growing and looking. All efforts to discover the largest yield, the biggest crop or perhaps the crispiest bite. Encased in glass, our memories form a new ecosystem, vibrating with a single hum of another home, dreaming of somewhere warmer. - millimetre is an exhibition space contained within a single picture frame. Devised by artists Finlay Taylor and Kate Scrivener this space for group exhibitions forces invited curators to consider and exploit scale, intimacy and the close juxtaposition of artworks. Read more Toggle Prints Mixed media