Review of ‘POLLINATION IV: the palms of y/our hands’
Holding Memory and Migration
By Anatashia Saminjo
POLLINATION IV: the palms of y/our hands, 2025, exhibition view at ILHAM Gallery. Photo by Kenta Chai.
Facilitated by in-tangible institute, POLLINATION is a biannual platform that fosters regional collaboration in Southeast Asia, bringing together artists and curators. Now in its fourth iteration, POLLINATION connects Diana Nway Htwe and Mark Teh, who first met in early 2024 during a curatorial workshop in Indonesia. This fourth edition unfolds as a deeply intimate and politically attuned collaboration. It was co-developed with and co-sponsored by ILHAM Gallery, the Sidharta Aboejono Martoredjo Fund for Arts and Ecology, and Foundation for Arts Initiatives, New York.
Drawing from ongoing conversations and shared experiences, this project narrates through gestures of holding. There is notable emphasis on shared authorship. Mark and Diana’s curatorial approach operates organically rather than hierarchically. Each collaborator is given their own station, their own space of autonomy. And thus, it holds Mark’s and Diana’s stories, alongside Jae Jae, M, Okui Lala, and Steven Nyi Nyi.
Diana Nway Htwe, 2024, wall text presented as part of POLLINATION IV: the palms of y/our hands, at ILHAM Gallery. Photo by Kenta Chai.
The exhibition’s collaborative ethos blurs the line between the artist and the participant, and the exhibition and everyday life. Okui Lala, whose socially engaged practice investigates migration, language, and labour, draws from her experiences as a cultural worker engaging with diverse communities in Malaysia. Her connection to the Burmese community in Penang began with her upbringing on Jalan Burma, a road historically linked to Burmese presence in the city.
Okui first met Steven Nyi Nyi, a Burmese migrant worker, 10 years ago through a mutual friend from Myanmar who was returning to his home country after spending 20 years in Penang. In her video tutorial, Let’s Eat and Drink Tea! (2015), Okui worked with Steven and his friend, Florence Lay, known in the Burmese community for her cooking, and who at the time had lived in Penang for four years. Conducted in Burmese, Malay, Hokkien, and English, the video demonstrates how to make Burmese tea leaf salad, Laphet Thoke. While food is sustenance, its role here is not only to nourish but also to connect. Food transports care across distances, acting as a bridge between places and people.
Installation view of Steven Nyi Nyi’s station, presented as part of POLLINATION IV: the palms of y/our hands, at ILHAM Gallery. Photo by Kenta Chai.
In a refrigerator, we see the tools Steven once used to fix fridges, his first job in Penang. There are also references to Steven’s past and present through food: Burmese comfort dishes alongside the menu of his current Penang cuisine restaurant in Yangon. These objects can be found in the “Poly-Nation” room, a homonym of “pollination”, suggesting multiplicity, hybridity, and diasporic belonging. There exists a tension in this room, between the transience of life in a foreign land and the grounding presence of commonplace items. They adorn the space, each demanding time and attention to parse through.
Okui Lala, Half My Life in Penang (1993–2018) (video still), 2025, GIF. Image courtesy of Okui Lala.
After 25 years in Penang, Steven’s voice emerges not as a testimonial subject but as a co-author. In his collaboration with Okui, he does not simply recount his past but relives it through the act of telling. To recount is to describe from a distance and to report events after they have happened. But to relive is to inhabit those moments again. The use of a GIF in Okui Lala’s Half My Life in Penang (1993-2018) reflects the looped structure and mirrors the repetitiveness of daily labour, while also resisting closure. These acts are ongoing. They repeat, adapt, and persist. These actions, minor yet persistent, become a kind of choreography of survival. The iteration presented in Kuala Lumpur, a city built on layers of migration and shaped by stark economic divide, feels apt. Migrant workers form the backbone of Malaysia’s economy, but are rarely acknowledged.
Installation view of Jae Jae’s station, presented as part of POLLINATION IV: the palms of y/our hands, at ILHAM Gallery. Photo by Kenta Chai.
The curators reject extractive narratives; rather, they foreground trust and agency. This is especially significant in the context of Myanmar where ongoing political crises have rendered many stories of forced migration invisible. Even more obscured are the lives of migrants who continue to be based there. Plugged into a 300-watt inverter is a laptop belonging to Jae Jae, a university student in Yangon who experiences regular electricity outages. This is not an isolated experience; power outages are part of daily life in Myanmar and have only worsened in recent years. Rather than centring violence or precarity, the exhibition has faith in the quiet presence of ordinary objects. These items are tools of survival, and also extensions of the body. They are not relics or artefacts, but items imbued with memories of those who have used them.
POLLINATION 4: the palms of y/our hands, installation view of room, ILHAM Gallery. Photo by Kenta Chai.
In the exhibition, each voice moves beyond narration. Their memories become a shared experience rather than merely a documented one. The collaborators’ stations converge centrally on a wall forming a radial timeline that brings together personal and national histories that span over 200 years, speaking to an evolving collective memory. The radiality suggests another way of reading time through ripples, repetitions, iterations and cycles. Mark notes that this form allows time to flow forwards and backwards, gesturing towards Diana’s wall text, as well as M’s interest in the black hole as a metaphor.
M, What I Am Interested In Is, 2025, text, light and sound installation, 10mins. Image by Kenta Chai.
POLLINATION IV: the palms of y/our hands embraces the transitory, the fragmentary, and the everyday. The nature of this exhibition’s subject matter is marked by precarity and there remains things unsaid. The exhibition’s strength lies in its ability to hold space for difference, allowing for a multiplicity of experiences to coexist without hierarchy. It succeeds in producing an empathetic space that challenges conventional representations of trauma and displacement. There is no pretense of a unified narrative. Each collaborator’s story is heard, and each one is held carefully in the palm of another’s hand.
POLLINATION IV: the palm of y/our hands is on view from 20 April to 20 July 2025 at ILHAM Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
About the Writer
Anatashia Saminjo currently works at a gallery in Kuala Lumpur. She completed her MA in History of Art from University College London (UCL), with a focus on Documentary Film and Photography. She has been involved in documentation and archival projects at UCL and the Courtauld Institute of Art’s Conway Library.
