Casgliadau Arlein

Installation made up of three wasli paper scrolls (NMW A 25341.1, 25341.2, 25341.3) displayed on the wall at different heights and unfurling onto three individual tables of the same width as the paper. A poem is painted on the wall next to the scrolls in handmade opaque watercolour made from sugarcane ash charcoal. The installation evokes the shape of the waves. Full installation instructions in the accession file.

Like waves unfurling, this work reimagines the movement of an ocean through wasli scroll South Asian miniature paintings hanging vertically from the wall to lay flat onto low tables. The work is experienced by the audiences body moving intimately within the space and with the work. This oceanic movement has displaced, migrated, moved bodies across oceans for trade, labour and empire. It is an unmapping of South Asian indentured women across oceans.

The tradition of South Asian scroll painting, was made to travel and share stories. Whereas, the form of South Asian miniatures were primarily produced in courts, for kings and wealthy – telling their stories, or religious narratives – rather than the histories of dark skin, casteless labourer women.

Tales of the ocean, and journeys taken – primarily tell the story of men. Whereas this work through, poetry, tells the story of kappal kari / jahajin / ship-sisters and their connections via ocean, through this experience, that continues and creates this legacy.

The story of South Asian indenture, and more broadly indenture in general continues – through descendants inheritance of memories and histories in DNA, memories in fields, vessels, oceans and bodies. This is a retelling of who has access, whose stories are told, an understanding of coolitude, kinship and the importance of that initial journey, which continues generationally.

Through an unwinding of scrolls, an unwinding of ocean occurs across the poetics of coolitude, of indenture. Both Edouard Glissant and Khal Torabully write how the voyage was a foundational moment for those taken as slaves and indentured – and their descendants. “The ancestor speaks, it is the ocean [...]” From ‘Ocean’ by Edouard Glissant p.50 in The Collected Poems of Edouard Glissant, Translated by Jeff Humphries.

Text taken from Artwork Information provided by artist - full document in accession files.