Echoes Over Oceans
Sancintya Mohini Simpson and Shivanjani Lal
Gallery 2
Opening 08.01.20 6-8pm
Artist Talks 30.01.20 6-7pm
Echoes Over Oceans We are mirrors. You and me. Our stories are echoes from different oceans and different continents. Sharing a history both our own and both lost. We have locations somewhere in South India, where we might be from... it is possible we could even be from the same village. The same gaon. Our bodies reflect another time, another India. Our families traversed the Kala Pani [Black Waters] in opposite directions. Sancintya’s towards Africa, and Shivanjani’s towards the Pacific. New lines were created, old ideas where unmade. We worked on cane fields and dreamed of our home, our mother country, India. Prayer becomes the language that told us about our home and our exile. We lost language, but gained song. We gave our bodies to the cane fields, so we could feed the Empire sugar. We lost our bodies, we lost our sweetness, we lost our home, and we lost our place in history. Using this as a navigating point we meet in Bengaluru, South India to create gestures towards healing. We tell the stories of the women of indentured labour, our ancestors were coerced, tricked and chosen by colonial enterprise, and taken to far off lands to do the bidding of Empire. We hold space for each other, through shared histories. The stories of our mothers, grandmothers and our great- grandmothers. It is not about holding onto pain, although that it is there, it is about witnessing survival, and the strength of holding space for our own.
Biography
Sancintya Mohini Simpson is an artist and researcher based in Brisbane, Australia. Her practice addresses the impact of colonisation on the historical and lived experiences of her family, and more broadly traces the movements and passages of indentured labourers from India to South Africa during the late 1800’s and throughout the early 1900’s. Her interdisciplinary practice draws on the archive to explore the complexities of migration, memory and trauma. Simpson’s work moves between painting and video, to poetry and performance, developing narratives and rituals, which she uses to navigate family history, and embed wider narratives surrounding the Indian indenture diaspora community.
Shivanjani Lal is a twice-removed Fijian-Indian-Australian artist and curator. As an artist living in Australia, she is tied to a long history of familial movement; her work uses personal grief to account for ancestral loss and trauma. She is a member of the indentured labourer diaspora from the Indian and Pacific oceans. She employs intimate images of family, sourced from photo albums, along with video and images from contemporary travels to the Asia-Pacific to reconstruct temporary landscapes. These landscapes act as shifting sites for diasporic healing - from which she emerges. A fundamental concern in the work is how art develops and represents culture as it transitions between contexts, while also probing the experiences of women in these situations of flux.
This project was assisted by a grant from Create NSW, an agency of the New South Wales Government and supported by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian State and Territory Governments. The program is administered by the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA).
Asialink Arts 2019 Creative Exchange
Creative Exchange is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.
Images
Echoes over Oceans Image 1,2. Sancintya Simpson and Shivanjani Lal 2019
Photographer Credit: Simon Torssell Lerin