Charles Lim Yi Yong’s work navigates the complex histories and shifting geographies of the sea, revealing it as less a pristine natural environment and more a territory shaped by culture, commerce and politics. His Stealing the Trapeze project charts the contested history of a key instrument used in competitive sailing. The trapeze is a counterbalancing rope system that attaches to a high point on the mast of a racing boat and hooks onto a crew member’s harness, allowing sailors to lean back to an almost horizontal posture, using their bodies as ballast.

Through photomedia, sculpture, archival reports and found objects, Lim – a former Olympic sailor – explores competing accounts of the invention of the trapeze as it migrated across continents and cultures. Foregrounding a similar apparatus used in traditional Malay kolek racing for generations, Lim suggests that British and New Zealand yachtsmen, exposed to South-East Asian boat design during the colonial period of the British Empire, appropriated the trapeze and claimed it as their own invention.

A spirit of competition characterises Stealing the Trapeze, implied by the artist’s deliberate pairing of model boats, rigging and variants in trapeze design within the installation. A two-channel video pitches a Western catamaran against a Malay kolek, juxtaposing conventions of sailing between the two geographies. Filmed in slow motion, it shows the trapeze placing the human body in an immediate relationship with the water, its rhythmical, almost acrobatic movements in concert with the wind and sea – man, boat and the elements as one.