The Fall

'The Fall' provides a contemporary illustration and insight into Singapore's and Australia's shared wartime experience during the Second World War and its complex legacies for both nations. It was developed as part of an Australia-Singapore Joint Artist Residency exchange programme, a partnership between the Australian War Memorial (AWM) and the National Museum of Singapore (NMS) and supported via a grant from the Australian Government's Anzac Centenary Production and Commissioning Fund.

'The Fall' responds to the fall of Singapore, an important milestone in the shared history of the two nations.

During her residency, Tiatia explored personal accounts of war survivors and representations of war landscapes from the collections of both AWM and NMS. Presenting her work as dual channel, she has been able to focus on personal experiences amongst the chaos. The horizontal video is a continuous frame that depicts recalled events while the vertical video focuses on specifics within the overall narrative. The two videos are intended to be screened via flatscreens exhibited next to each other. Tiatia has intentionally not included audio in either video so that the viewer can focus on visually devastating events that unfolded following the fall of Singapore on February 15th, 1942.

Angela Tiatia is a filmmaker, curator and visual artist, exhibiting since 2010. Her work has featured in exhibitions around the world including Cologne, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Mexico City, Honolulu, Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney, Auckland, Wellington and Singapore. Tiatia's work explores global contemporary cultures, drawing attention to their relationship to the construction of cultural and sexual identity, the com modification of the body and place, representation, gender and neo-colonialism. Her video work explores the significant themes of cultural displacement and disturbance due to the effects of economic and social globalisation.