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Sin Wai Kin, The Fortress, 2024. Film still. Courtesy and © the artist. Co-commissioned by Lahore Biennale Foundation and Forma. Supported by The British Council and Shane Akeroyd. Selected for AFI’25 by Forma and Southwark Park Galleries, London, UK.

Sin Wai Kin

The Fortress

(2024) 22 minutes

Selected for AFI '25 by Forma and Southwark Park Galleries, London.

Sin Wai Kin’s The Fortress deconstructs the archetype of “Man,” the so-called rational subject of Western Enlightenment, whose self-appointed authority has shaped canons of knowledge and justified imperialism. Through a dreamlike narrative, Sin dismantles the illusion of his inherent and singular supremacy, exposing the unstable foundations on which his dominance rests and the catastrophic consequences of this constructed paradigm.

Set across two historically significant sites in Lahore, The Fortress follows Wai King, embodied by Sin Wai Kin, as he rehearses for the role of Man at Alfalah Theatre. His performance falters and he begins to fall apart, forcing a reckoning with the fallacy of his universality. At Lahore Fort, he confronts his ghostly double - an echo of past selves and fractured histories. Between these spaces, the boundaries between self and world dissolve, exposing the fragility of his fabricated reality.

The Fortress takes its title from thirteenth century Sufi poet Rūmī’s Mathnawī, which calls for the walls of a fortress to be demolished to dispel a sense of othering. Exposing existence as fragmented and plural, the film unravels identity and power, critiquing Western-centric knowledge systems and challenging the notion of a fixed reality. In doing so, The Fortress rejects the hegemonic narratives of human experience, revealing its inherent inequities and multiplicities. If reality is constructed, it is also open to dismantling, reimagining, and remaking.

Artist Q&A

What compels you to work with moving image, and when did you first become interested in the medium?
I am interested in moving image because it is one of the most common sites of storytelling in culture. It is all around us in advertising, social media, film and tv. In order to interrupt these narratives and speak to that history of knowledge production I like to occupy those same mediums to perform and then complicate the relationships within them.

Can you speak about the potential that dreaming and altered states of reality offer individuals and societies? How do you feel this is reflected in filmmaking and in your artwork specifically?
Fantasy is not just escapism, it can also be a view from elsewhere to reflect on our everyday context and embodiment. You can’t see the whole of something until you are outside of it.

Please share a list of books, music, films, artworks, thinkers, spaces and places that inspire your practice, and in particular have fed into your thinking around this film.

Rumi - Masnavi
Chuang Tzu - Inner Chapters
Kathryn Yusoff - A Billion Black Anthropocenes or none
Donna Haraway - Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene
Stephen Hawking - A Brief History of Time
Tarsem Singh - The Cell, The Fall (films)

Sin Wai Kin. Photo: Holly Falconer

Artist Link

Sin Wai Kin (b. 1991, Toronto, CA) brings fantasy to life through storytelling in moving image, performance, writing, and print. Drawing on experiences of existing between binary categories, their work realizes alternate worlds to describe lived experiences of desire, identification and consciousness.

The artist was nominated for the 2024 Jarman award for their film works Dreaming the End (2023) and The Breaking Story (2022). They were the recipient of the 24th Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel 2023 for their film series Portraits (2023). Their film, A Dream of Wholeness in Parts (2021) was nominated for the 2022 Turner Prize, and included in the touring exhibition the British Art Show 9, as well as being screened at the British Film Institute’s 65th London Film Festival.

Solo exhibitions include Accelerator, Stockholm (2024); Kunsthall Trondheim, Trondheim (2024); Canal Projects, New York (2025); Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong (2025). Recent solo exhibitions include MUDAM, Luxembourg (2024); Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York (2024); Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley (2023); Dreaming the End at Fondazione Memmo, Rome (2023); A Dream of Wholeness in Parts at Soft Opening, London (2022); It’s Always You at Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong (2021)

Group exhibitions include Greater Toronto Art (GTA24) at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto; CUTE at Somerset House, London (2024); After Laughter Comes Tears at Mudam, Luxembourg (2023); Turner Prize 2022, Tate Liverpool, (2022); MYTH MAKERS — SPECTROSYNTHESIS III, Taikwun, Hong Kong (2022); Drawing Attention at The British Museum, London (2022). Sin’s work is held in the collections of Tate Collection, UK; The British Museum Prints & Drawings; White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney; Ferens Art Gallery, Hull; The Ingram Collection of Modern British Art, UK; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo; Sunpride Foundation, Hong Kong and M+ Museum, Hong Kong.

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