scanning movement

video, 2 fabric prints

Continuing an examination into family archives and locating transient identities, scanning movement s a video installation that seeks to map the biographical circumstances of the artist’s aunt, a migrant to Finland from Malaysia in the early 2000s. With the artist’s international upbringing as a backdrop, the work seeks to map the artist’s simultaneous disconnect and kinship with their aunt’s adjacent biographical circumstances, an outlier within their family as the first member of Soo’s family to resettle beyond Asia. Uniting negatives from family archives, found footage, personal text, abstracted renditions of national anthems and collaged Facetime conversations with their aunt and family as premises of departure, the installation reconfigures fragments from these artifacts of connection into a meditation on relating to distance and post-migration identity.

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The notion of scanning becomes a central metaphor within the work’s components: a surface search towards representation, borne from a desire to connect summons motifs of forests, unified with their seeming visual impenetrability, yet metaphorically laden with heterogeneous details concealed. Emphasising the fractured materialities within these documents of connection – pixelated artifacts from long-distance calls, hallucinations generated from dragged scans, marks repeated on weather-damaged negatives – Soo shifts and makes unclear their functions as documents of locating identities and memories, instead focusing on their boundaries as visualisations of loss and distance, accumulated through multiple histories and perspectives. At the same time, while presenting its textures of loss in abstracted form, the work’s surfaces also become generative: points of reimagining new fragmented details, and premises for the artist for familial connection, a site to begin conversations with relatives long disconnected.