EXHIBITIONS /

The Plantation Plot

20 April – 21 September 2025 (Level 5)

In collaboration with KADIST, a global non-profit art organisation committed to fostering dialogue on societal issues through art, ILHAM Gallery will be presenting The Plantation Plot from 20 April – 21 September 2025. The exhibition which explores manifestations of the plantation system is curated by Lim Sheau Yun, an emerging curator in Malaysia, who both ILHAM and Kadist selected based on her exhibition proposal. Sheau Yun is a writer and editor, in the fields of art and architecture, and their histories.

The Plantation Plot features the work of 28 artists and collectives, primarily from Southeast Asia and the Americas, that emerged in the wake of the plantation. At the heart of the plantation plot was growth, progress, and an open market, where monocrop commodities were planted with zeal and travelled freely across the globe. Plantations were the engine of European imperial expansion, where cash crops were produced for export, and how empires accumulated surplus wealth. Taking cue from Jamaican critic Sylvia Wynter, the exhibition refigures the plantation plot as both story and place. The plot demanded large-scale human labour to tap rubber in Malaya, to harvest sugarcane in the Caribbean, to plant tea in India and Sri Lanka. Thus, it rewrote human geographies, treating people as auxiliary to monoculture and ‘planting’ them in foreign lands. Some travelled far — Tamil labourers, often indentured, were transplanted in Malaya, Guyana, South Africa. Others, such as the Huitoto and Bora natives of the Peruvian Amazon, were dispossessed and enslaved to collect wild rubber on their own land.

The exhibition features over 60 works from the collections of Kadist and ILHAM, as well as other private and public collections. The exhibition also includes several commissioned works.