This is the first of a two-part exhibition (the title originated in the idea of a confusion about where a previous exhibition took place)*. It is an immense installation of a tropical rainforest inside the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern.

*First established in 1990 as the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam (the second largest city in the Netherlands), in 2020 it entered a period of "namelessness” - as a result of the links with colonialism associated with its namesake (a former employee for both the Dutch East India Company and the Dutch West India Company).

It was not originally intentionally named after Witte Corneliszoon de With (1599 – 1658), the Dutch naval officer, but rather the street bearing his name that the building was located on. (‘Naming art institutions after locations in a bid to affirm neutrality was a trend in those days’, commented former director Defne Ayas.)

This issue over its name was raised by critic Egbert Alejandro Martina during preparations for an exhibition being organised in conjunction with the Dutch pavilion for the 2017 Venice Biennale. (The institution addressed the issue in the twelfth of its Rotterdam Cultural Histories exhibition series, entitled With de With; What’s in a name?)

And in 2021, it was finally renamed the Kunstinstituut Melly, in reference to a work by the Chinese-Canadian artist and educator artist Ken Lum which exists on an outside wall of the building, entitled Melly Shum Hates Her Job (1990).

Melly Shum Hates Her Job is a billboard on the corner of Boomgaardstraat and Witte de Withstraat (Witte de With street). It is from a series of works that Lum achieved fame for in the mid-1980s (the Portrait-Logo series), which combined portraits and abstract logos and text.

Melly Shum Hates Her Job is made up of two halves; the left hand side presents the smiling face of Melly Shum, who turns away from her desk to address us (the anonymous addressee); on the right hand side are five words on a white background which are ordered vertically:

MELLY
SHUM
HATES
HER
JOB

The letters of the middle word ’HATES’ are red and in bold, with black outlines (around which the illusion of strips of yellow neon light circulate), while the letters for the other words (above and below it) are blue.

Lum staged the inaugural solo exhibition of the art institution in 1990, which included a commission for a billboard version of Melly Shum Hates Her Job, which was also installed at various locations in the city (which, along with its belonging to a series, further erodes the traditional idea of the unity of work as existing in an individual material instantiation).

After initially being taken down at the end of the exhibition, popular demand resulted in the work returning to the side of the building, becoming a permanent fixture.

The decision to replace its name with part of the title of Lum’s work marks a symbolic break from a traditional Eurocentric narrative of history.