And words were whispered (Holding, Hoeing, Dragging, Planting, Hanging, Carrying, Kneeling, Cutting, Sitting, Laying)

2019 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Series of 10, 63 x 88 cm each

Sancintya Mohini Simpson

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And words were whispered by Sancintya Mohini Simpson is a series of ten works on paper based on the lived experiences of Indian women taken to the Natal region of South Africa from the 1860s to the early 1900s to work in tea and sugarcane plantations during apartheid, which included servitude in its broadest and most sinister definition. This often-overlooked chapter in colonial history is close to the artist, as her maternal family was contracted to a sugar plantation in Natal, then one of the four British colonies in South Africa. These indentured servants, derogatorily called ‘coolies’, were employees by title, but were effectually slaves. They were paid negligible wages for exhausting hours, prohibited from leaving the plantation, and regularly assaulted by employers. Each of the ten scenes in the series offers an intimate portrait of life in the fields. Most of Simpson’s drawings depict seemingly innocuous acts of labor such as hoeing, planting, and cutting, but in others depicting acts of violence perpetrated against the women. While confronting a sombre and tragic history, rather than seeking to crucify regimes, Simpson instead focuses on healing and finding reconciliation through acts of revelation and exposure. Simpson’s work urges viewers to reconsider colonial narratives and histories that have been made invisible by centering the violence and hardship experienced by thousands of Indian indentured laborers. Through And words were whispered Simpson continues to trace her familial history, creating a new archive that speaks to shared narratives of migration, loss, healing, and a broader inter-generational memory of indenture labor’s human cost.

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Sancintya Mohini Simpson is an artist, writer, and researcher whose work addresses the impact of colonization on the historical and lived experiences of her family and broader diasporic communities. Simpson descends from indentured laborers sent from India to work on colonial sugar plantations in South Africa during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Working between various mediums, including painting, video, poetry, and performance, Simpson pays particular attention to the gaps and erasures within the colonial archive that fail to acknowledge (or make invisible) the lives of over two million Indian indentured servants. Simpson traces the movements and passages of these laborers and her own familial past, giving voice to these often omitted histories, many of which are passed down orally through generations, including by her own mother. The complexities of memory, migration, and intergenerational trauma that she unearths serve as a means of reconciling with a violent past. What she proposes is a new speculative archive where loss and healing can coexist.

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Colors:

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• bondage.n.02
• labor.n.02
• colonialism.n.01
• imperialism.n.01
• violence.n.01
• woman.n.01
• patriarchy.n.01
• memory.n.01
• trauma.n.02