11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

kūlī / khulā 2024 / Colour on wasli paper / Nine wasli scrolls: 40 × 400cm (each); installed dimensions: 130 × 1210cm / Commissioned for APT11 / Courtesy: The artist and Milani Gallery, Meanjin/Brisbane / This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body NOTES 1 The last ship carrying indentured labourers arrived in South Africa in 1911. The indenture system lasted from 1834 to 1920. See Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas 1830–1920 , Oxford University Press, London, 1974, p.363. 2 ‘Kūlī’ was a caste term for porter, used in the English context to refer to an indentured labourer or Indian labourer. It is considered offensive in the South African Bhojpuri language, but in South African Tamil ‘kuli-kare’ was used to refer to all Indian workers. See Rajend Mesthrie, ‘Indenture in language: The words the workers made’, Journal of Natal and Zulu History , vol.34, no.1, pp.142–50. 3 Sir Liege Hulett was knighted for his contributions to the colony of Natal despite shocking levels of suicide and exploitation among its population. See Selvan Naidoo, ‘The financial collapse of Tongaat Hulett Sugar . . . a colonial legacy of subjugation and exploitation that continues today’, 1860 Heritage Centre , <1860heritagecentre.wordpress. com/2019/10/16/the-financial-collapse- of-tongaat-hulett-sugar-a-colonial- legacy-of-subjugation-and-exploitation- that-continues-today-by-selvan- naidoo/>, viewed June 2024. 4 Rajsekhar Basu, ‘Kunti’s cry: Responses in India to the cause of emigrant women, Fiji 1913–16’, Studies in People’s History , vol.7, no.2, December 2020, pp.180–91. Sancintya Mohini Simpson is deeply connected to the subject of her landscape paintings through histories of colonial exploitation, family memories and intergenerational healing. The artist is a descendent of indentured labourers sent from India to work on colonial sugar plantations in South Africa. Her works not only confront traumas echoing through her matrilineal ancestry, but also wider histories of displacement through indentured labour, honouring those who were forced to make impossible journeys of migration, and recognising the suffering that travels through generations. Simpson has carefully collected and studied an archive of photographs and texts to uncover clandestine accounts of such exploitative colonial histories. The act of collecting, and becoming a custodian of the records, is one she approaches with great sensitivity, honouring the experiences endured by these people, and giving deep consideration to their representation in the past and in the present. She first focused on Indians taken to the British colony of Natal, South Africa, from the 1860s to the early 1900s, to work in tea and sugar cane plantations during apartheid. 1 Simpson’s maternal family were contracted to a sugar plantation in Natal, and she has slowly accumulated records of 29 of her relatives — including dates they left their homelands, the names of ships they travelled on and their numbers of indenture — some of whommade the journey as small children. Painted across nine long sheets of handmade wasli paper sourced from papermakers in Jaipur, where Simpson studied miniature painting techniques, kūlī / khulā 2024 explores indenture and resilience. 2 In the work, Simpson connects stories of indentured women and the relationships between them, interspersed within a landscape littered with references to operations across the colonies. These include the Barracks Compound at Maidstone, Tongaat, Natal — home to the Tongaat Hulett Sugar company that removed local Africans from the land in order to import vast numbers of indentured labourers from India, who were kept in substandard conditions and suffered high levels of abuse. 3 Simpson’s paintings include other stories, such as that of 20-year-old Kunti who, after being made to work in a separated banana field in Fiji so an overseer could sexually assault her, jumped into a river to flee him. At the time, Kunti’s story sparked outcry in India against indenture. 4 The Aapravasi Ghat in Mauritius, one of the first British colonies to process indentured labour where more than half a million Indian labourers were received, is also illustrated, as well as the SS Ganges steamship which could carry more than 800 passengers and transported Indian labourers to the colonies until the final years of the indenture system. For kūlī / khulā , Simpson employs South Asian miniature painting approaches; however, in recognising the genre’s privileging of gender, caste, class and colourism, she has also looked to other historic forms of representation in South Asia, such as scroll painting. Using this style is a way to challenge the writing of history, and who gets to have their story told and accounted for. Unlike miniature painting, scroll painting traditions in the region have survived outside the wealthy courts. Long scrolls, known as pats, were painted by chitrakars (picture- makers) of lower castes and designed to be rolled up so artists could carry them from village to village. The mobile nature of these scrolls, and the stories they told, evolved through families’ singing the stories they contained, which similarly reflects Simpson’s stories being carried across time and space through family lines. Simpson’s characters, particularly the women included in her works, are painted with intimate care and attention, imaging not only the labour, violence and betrayals of bonded ownership, but also the women’s love and friendship and their connection to distant homes and cultures. In doing so, Simpson confronts the stereotypes perpetuated in colonial archival accounts, and privileges the lives and stories of the individual women and their surviving interconnections. TARUNNAGESH BORN 1991, BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA LIVES+WORKS INBRISBANE SANCINTYAMOHINI SIMPSON ARTISTS+PROJECTS ASIAPACIFICTRIENNIAL 184 — 185