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From the neighbouring installation, a low chant spreads across the gallery. The voices belong to Roger Anis’ A Home on the Nile (2026), which consists of four screens set against deep purple walls. While Civikov’s intimate process of piecing together family memory feels like a puzzle that refuses to fully resolve, Anis proposes a more affirmative form of remembering as pointing toward forms of care yet to be realised.

Developed in collaboration with a fishing community on the island of Qursaya in Cairo, the work follows gestures of daily life along the Nile. A fisherman dives into the dark water with his bare hands while a child steers the boat beside him. The camera lingers on these acts of coordination, tracing a relation between bodies and the river. Gradually, a lotus flower enters the narrative. Its petals open in time-lapse before it is cut from the water and passed from hand to hand, moving through fields and villages before returning to the river. The journey culminates in the revival of the Nile Parade, a celebration that once honoured the river’s cycles of water and fertility. For Anis, such rituals function as living forms of memory carried through collective practice rather than written records.

Nearby, a dried lotus flower rests inside a glass case. Isolated from its environment, it becomes both a memory and a warning. Once widespread along the Nile, the blue lotus has largely disappeared, pointing to the ecological fragility that underlies the work.

Downstairs, the atmosphere shifts. Leaving behind the pastel tones of Civikov’s banners and the sense of hope carried by the chant in Anis’s work, I feel as if I am descending into a darker register of the exhibition, where remembering begins to surface its more unsettling histories. With Priyageetha Dia’s Spectre System (2024), the exhibition moves into the spectral landscapes of colonial plantation economies. A vertical screen stands before a mural of elongated hands whose fluid forms recall the elasticity of rubber, the material that shaped the colonial economy of the Malay Peninsula. Vegetation, industrial fragments and disembodied forms drift through a terrain that feels both familiar and unstable. At its centre are the Inaivu, entities drawn from Tamil and Malay traditions of remembrance, moving through the landscape as carriers of ancestral rituals and knowledge.

In Dia’s work, the concept of rememory becomes almost tangible. The Inaivu move through memory as something embedded in time, bodies and spaces. This brings to my mind the Indigenous feminist concept of cuerpo-territorio (body-territory), articulated by Maya-Xinka activist Lorena Cabnal, which understands body and land as inseparable, both marked by histories of extraction and control.[1] Dia’s work suggests that these logics have not disappeared: they have simply shifted form. If (re)memory can travel between bodies, land, and time, might remembrance then become a resource for collective repair?

In a nearby room, Ben Yau approaches this question from a more analytical angle, making visible how colonial erasure was actively produced. Returning to British rule in Malaya and the rubber economy that sustained it, his installation unfolds through three interconnected vignettes: brief, concentrated scenes that condense larger historical processes. The room resembles an archival storage space. Metal shelves hold brown document boxes while a wooden table stands beneath a single hanging bulb. One vignette is activated through sound. An imagined confession by a British officer recounts Operation Legacy, the covert programme through which thousands of colonial records deemed embarrassing to the British government were destroyed before Malayan independence. As the voice calmly describes the burning of documents, the light above the table remains off, leaving the room in half-shadow. Another vignette appears through projection. Archival footage references the Malayan Film Unit, established in 1946 to produce propaganda films portraying colonial rule as orderly and benevolent.

The final vignette unfolds at the table. As an interview begins, the desk lamp switches on, illuminating two altered books: a family album with figures cut out, leaving only silhouettes, and a sparse genealogy where most branches remain blank. The recording belongs to Eddy Wong, who recounts how he began tracing the story of his grandfather, who disappeared during the anti-colonial struggle when Wong’s father was still a child. The grandfather’s body was never recovered; the grave carried only his name.

Starting, like Civikov, from a personal attempt to reconstruct family history through fragments and inherited silences, Yau uses remembering to expose how colonial power systematically produced absence, creating perhaps the clearest articulation of its meaning as counter-archiving in the exhibition. By attending to what is missing as much as what remains, Yau foregrounds the structures that shape historical visibility, without attempting to stabilise an entirely new narrative. It is a proposal for exactly this restructuring of memory that Morrison’s concept of rememory articulates.

When I ask curator Leana Boven what felt urgent to articulate through this exhibition, and why now, she turns to Langston Hughes’s poem Tired (1935):

‘Let us take a knife
And cut the world in two—
And see what worms are eating
At the rind.’ [2]

For Boven, the poem captures the exhaustion many feel in the face of repeating cycles of violence, but also the urgency of naming them rather than looking away. Positions: Unearthing succeeds in making this exhaustion palpable, unfolding as a movement from the tentative hope of reconstruction toward a more difficult clarity. Across the works in the exhibition, counter-archiving operates both as a method and a proposition. It allows these histories to re-enter the present, but it also reveals its own limits: what has been destroyed cannot be fully restored, only traced through fragments. If the past continues to inhabit the present, as these works suggest, then remembering may not simply be about recovery. It may also be a necessary step toward imagining different futures.

METROPOLIS M KAN NIET ZONDER JE STEUN

BIJ VOORBAAT DANK!