By simply keying words such as “Malaya rubber”, “Malayan Rubber Plantation,” one can dig into a vast collection of stock photography. Stored, classified, and distributed by multinational super-agencies—the largest being Getty images, these photographs are part of a globalised industry. With watermarks embedded in the preview mode on each photograph, these companies mark a legacy of control and commodification over the labourers’ bodies with roots in plantation colonialism. Lynn Hollen Lees once highlighted how the plantation industry in Malaya was a hierarchical and unequal system that cut across gender and ethnicity in all aspects of life, from the space workers occupied, to the clothes they wore, and the food they ate. The control over the workers’ bodies extended to their representation whether through words or images. This mode of subordination took a visible form in the travellers’ diaries, plantation owners’ accounts and photographs that one can now purchase online. Sourcing images online, the artist has appropriated a series of trademarked photographs and imprinted them on satin and latex in two distinct works part of the exhibition. In one series of prints, the stock images are superimposed on fabric. In another, they are printed with white ink on off-white latex. Irrespective of the printing material, the found images gain spectral qualities. Details of labourers in the plantation estates disappear into the rubber or haunt the landscape of plantations. A hammock created out of latex sheets is suspended across the gallery. More than a site of rest, the hammock is an archive of labouring bodies that are placed in the material they brought into existence with their hands. 

When archives of colonial histories are filled with omissions, gaps, and prejudices, one has to acknowledge, in the words of the writer Saidiya Hartnam, an impossibility. The impossibility to know what has not been told, recorded or experienced. The challenge, asserts Hartnam, is not to give voice to what remains untold, but rather to “imagine what cannot be verified”. Combining mass-production techniques such as screenprinting in the treatment of digitised archival photography, with the world-building and speculative capacities of CGI modelling, Forget Me, Forget Me Not posits that to resist forgetting, one needs to conjure new forms of telling.

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