One Day We’ll Understand – Asia TOPA 2025

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Image: Joseph Nair

Australian Premiere Season Asia TOPA 2025

A CultureLink Singapore Production with the producing partnership of Chamber Made

Footscray Community Arts Performance Space

Thursday 27 February – Saturday 1 March 2025

One Day We’ll Understand is a new multimedia performance exploring memory and inheritance through the compelling family history of visual artist Sim Chi Yin.

Set against the Malayan Emergency, the performance is part-documentary and part-speculative, examining how we contend with the past and the future. Through the lens of Sim’s life and camera, we time travel into her family archive, recovering traces left in the wake of the anti-colonial war in British Malaya and beyond.

Led by a Singaporean-Australian creative team, the work combines haunting imagery with narration, archival footage and a driving live score by percussionist Cheryl Ong, to depict Sim’s multiple personas as artist, historian, writer, mother and granddaughter.

Drawing on Sim’s large body of work in film and photography, One Day We’ll Understand transcends the autobiographical to more universal experiences of memory, loss, trauma, restitution and repair. It unearths hidden histories, Chinese diasporic experiences and the long legacies of colonialism, opening up ways to think about our past and future.

The work is directed by Chamber Made Artistic Director Tamara Saulwick with dramaturgy by Kok Heng Leun, video art by Nick Roux and lighting design by Andy Lim.

 

“Sim Chi Yin’s miraculous counter-archive is brought to life.. Ong’s percussive soundscape broadens the ambit of the story into something mythic … an epic journey.” STRAITS TIMES

One Day We’ll Understand is a CultureLink Singapore production in partnership with Chamber Made commissioned by Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay with support from Footscray Community Arts.

 

There are two associated events with One Day We’ll Understand: visual art exhibition Chronotopia by Sim Chi Yin at Footscray Community Arts and Long Table Discussion a silence that sits at the Immigration Museum.
One Day We’ll Understand premiered in Singapore at Esplanade Theatre in August 2024 (View details here)