This work is a series of 260 colour photographs of common living areas from homes across Malaysia which Simryn Gill photographed in June and July 2001. The title of the work is the Malay word meaning 'deep', 'inside' or 'interior'. Gill has said:

'Perhaps I conceived this project as a way to see "my" country, a way to travel through its inner landscape. I made the journey with my friend Mary Maguire, who is a film maker and worked as my production manager and driver during the shoot. We didn't work with a planned itinerary during the shoot. I wanted to feel a sense of being able to go "wherever I chose" when I woke up each morning. There is of course something a little romantic or unrealisable about such an apparent freedom, but one has to play at these things sometimes. In reality we worked with a very bare outline of a travel plan and decided on the details as we went along. We aimed to get to bigger towns by certain days, making many detours and travelling along back-roads rather than the new highways that criss-cross the country. In some towns we had contacts - names of people given to us by friends - whom we approached to help introduce us to their friends and relatives. Or we engaged the help of locals, a taxi driver in one case, a hotel security guard in another, to do the same. But a lot of the time we just knocked on doors.'(1)

One of Gill's compelling interests is to investigate how people define themselves in relation to family, community and nation. Dalam explores these ideas through a series of images of intimate and private interiors. Gill examines how a community might be presented by concentrating on the individual, the micro level, and inevitably probes the function of the documentary photograph. In showing the interiors of 260 homes across Malaysia one is given some definitive statement about the nation. What becomes apparent when looking at these photographs is the common needs and desires of people: television sets, the need to decorate and personalise, the inclusion of devotional objects, are shared features to many people's homes across the world. How then does one think of the interiors of these pictures as Malaysian? To raise questions is deeply characteristic of much of Gill's practice. She often approaches complex issues, such as exploring notions of identity, by asking herself a series of questions; she uses the process of creating to unravel the complexities that are inherent to her quest. Dalam was the result of two questions. 'What does the "inside" of a place look like? Do many people held together by geography add up to the idea of a nation or single unified group?'(2)

The array of interior views of the homes that Gill entered was her methodology of addressing these questions. The sum of these 260 images is that they are both as revealing as they are mysterious. Scholar Ashley Curruthers observes the absence of the human figure in Dalam in terms of phantom spectres. Curruthers attaches this observation to many of Gill's previous works which often suggest the human presence through allegory, such as the shredded books in her portfolio Forest 1998 (Acc. no. 1998.114.001-016), or the use of man-made objects as intrinsic to the art object (see Forking tongues Acc. no. 2001-062a-). Curruthers describes Dalam as emerging from 'the anthropomorphism of Gill's work in general where couches, chairs, clocks and curios begin to develop "personality". In short these interiors are haunted.'(3). It is through this notion of the ghostly presence that the enigmatic aspects of Dalam become evident. The viewer has to imagine the people who might live in these homes while knowing that they have been afforded the privilege of access to often humble but, without doubt, private places.

1. Gill, Simryn. Artist's statement for the exhibition 'Dalam'. Galeri Petronas, Kuala Lumpur, 2001.
2. Zuckerman Jacobson, Heidi. 'Dalam', in Simryn Gill: Selected work [exhibition catalogue], Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2002, p.19.
3. Curruthers, Ashley. 'Simryn Gill, Dalam'. Focus: Forum on contemporary art & society, vol. 4, 2002, p.247.