ABSTRACT
In June 2011, the railway station at Tanjong Pagar, which once marked the terminus of the Malaysian-run and owned Keretapi Tanah Melayu (KTM) railway line, ceased operations. The station was an anomaly by Singaporean standards; a sign on the station platform read ‘Welcome to Malaysia’. Beneath such salutations, the railway was a marker of contested sovereign territory amidst a political rupture between Singapore and Malaysia in their separation of 1965. The station was a literal if also deeply unsettled border embodied now as dirty, derelict, and decaying architecture. In this chapter, I examine the neglect and ruination of this building, both literally and symbolically, to the tropics through Simryn Gill’s ongoing work on the station, including Guide to the Murals at Tanjong Pagar Railway Station, a book created for the Singapore Art Biennale in 2006, where she juxtaposes contemporary photographs of commuters with an architectural description of the station’s murals. I argue that Gill’s appropriation of the architectural guidebook to the station forefronts the implications, and risks, of time passing, complicating also how we constitute historical evidence and sequential narrative.
