tama—Every Name in History is I (2003), which consists of a video and twenty portrait paintings, images the quixotic pursuit of the distant past. Depicting the 14th-century figure of Sang Nila Utama, a discoverer of the island nation, the video weaves together apocryphal relationships with other historical regional leaders to boost the legitimacy of the founding narrative and collapses time by employing the same person to play other explorers including Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Zheng He, and Singapore’s British colonizer Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles. The work simultaneously assembles and dispels myth. (Guggenheim)

According to official accounts of its history, Singapore was founded by Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819. However, little is known about the pre-colonial founder of Singapore, Sang Nila Utama, who is believed to have spotted a lion on the island and thus named it Singapura (meaning 'lion city' in Malay).

List of chapters is as follows:
Chapter I: Utama - on his proper name
Chapter II: Utama - on the renunciation by the crown
Chapter III: Julius Cesar - on crowns and power
Chapter IV: Utama - on the uncertain origins of our name
Chapter V: Actaeon - on the impossibility of the search for origins