Minyak Sawit Keluarga (Palm Oil Family) 2023
now online at ACMI's Gallery 5
A new co-commission by Hyphenated Projects and ACMI
Minyak Sawit Keluarga (Palm Oil Family) by artist Olivia Koh, examines her paternal family’s history of farming practices in rural Southern Malaysia. Footage of domestic-scale palm oil plantations in Johor State is interspersed with visual and auditory recordings of funerary Daoist rituals, documents and interviews that consider the palm oil industry.
Using a combination of new footage and archival film from ACMI's collection, with audio-mixing and post-production by Bonnie Cummings, Minyak Sawit Keluarga takes a fragmentary, ethnographic approach to history of palm oil production, tracing the emotional, social and political resonance of the industry across decades.
This work is now in the ACMI Collection
