Collage and the archive serve as sites of resistance and remembrance, offering ways to confront histories of conflict, migration and colonial power. This conversation explores how artists use layered visual languages to preserve memory and reimagine identity as something shaped by both inherited and lived experience.

Arpita Akhanda and Sim Chi Yin each draw on the material and emotional traces of place to explore how histories endure. Akhanda weaves together layers of maps and images of her grandparents, grappling with intergenerational memories, family archives and the cartography of colonialism . Sim engages with the afterlives of colonialism and conflict in China and Southeast Asia, using photography and moving image to probe the instability of archives and the legacies of trauma that reverberate through time. Together, their practices consider how forms of montage can visualise dissent, give form to absence and reveal untold stories.

The discussion will be chaired by Bindi Vora, Senior Curator at Autograph and curator of I Still Dream of Lost Vocabularies, Autograph's major exhibition exploring collage, political erasure and the poetics of reconstruction.