Exhibition texts

Nikhil Chopra

In charting the free-flowing nature of Afrasian waters, we acknowledge how the navigation and inhabitation of the Indian Ocean has been historically premised on seasonal cycles and wind systems. In One Water, Many Lands (2023) Nikhil Chopra evokes the contours of water cycles that interlink the Indian Ocean with the lands it unfurls against. Throughout much of his work, Chopra’s performative acts are strongly connected to egress and landscape. This is done as a means to channel a personal metamorphosis, but also with the aim of transforming physical and mental spaces. Here, journeying through a vast marine scenery is a way for Chopra to trade the stability of the land in exchange for a liquid horizon in perpetual states of motion – from glaciers to waterfalls, estuaries to clouds. Incarnating a humble persona dressed in mud and cotton, he dwells on a floating platform, painting waterscapes on canvas sheets with deep blue pigments and ochres obtained from mud and clay. With a twelve-hour performance and a room-scale installation, Chopra’s body acts as a catalyst, transfiguring the architecture of the Gropius Bau with representations of the sea, celebrating the oneness of water, the connectedness of its ecologies and its fluctuating cycles.

Clara Jo

Islands and archipelagos of this ocean have included some of the earliest architectures of quarantine and colonial hospitals that have induced traumatic suffering. The movement of human beings has been accompanied with animals and botanicals along ancient maritime routes. The history of epidemics is often recounted through a colonial lens and thus framed problematic terms for contagion, such as “exposure” and “first contact” that continue to reside and shape societal notions of a healthy subject. Clara Jo conceives a film with animation sequences that invite us to critically reassess the nautical imagination and the docking on land through processes of decay, the circulation of contagious disease, detention and regeneration. The artist reflects on historical antecedents of incarceration in Albion and Flat Island in Mauritius and presents allegorical protagonists to explore how fear is planted in our living systems: how viral loads and waterborne diseases have spread with mercantile ambition and, finally, which bodies are pinned down as “foreign agents” and thus stigmatised as threats to the civic body.

Jennifer Tee

Trade textiles, such as East African Kanga, Pelangi in Southern Sumatra and Indian Chintz, reveal embodied legacies and centuries old circuits of oceanic exchange. Jennifer Tee reconnects with her Chinese-Indonesian ancestry by journeying to Sumatra and studying textile collections in Europe. Her encounter with tampan and palepai textiles, known as ship cloths by Europeans, has led to a longer-term inquiry. Reviving emblematic patterns through a collaging process using pressed tulip petals, the artist pays homage to an ancestral crossroads between her father, who travelled by ship with his sister and parents to the Netherlands after the Second World War, and her grandfather, an exporter of tulip bulbs, who frequently sailed to the United States. With Tee’s artistic corpus Tampan Tulip, which she has grown since 2010, the ship becomes a site of transfiguration that resonates as cultural leitmotif and structuring principle, reframing its role in littoral societies beyond maritime power. As tampans reveal, there is an intrinsic correlation between the boatload and the household as social units indicative of both the container and the contained. Often represented around the ship and its interior are amphibians, birds (such as hornbills), snakes and the tree of life. As ceremonial textiles, the illustrations carried within also connect to the divine sphere.

M'barek Bouhchichi

M’barek Bouhchichi’s sculptural work superimposes the concepts of a braille slab and a tribulum. A tribulum is a historical sledge for threshing still used in many parts of the African continent to separate seeds from the lot of a harvest as well as chaffs. This broad, heavy mostly wooden board is furnished with teeth of stone or iron and visually reminiscent of writing systems on stones in varying civilisations around the world. This connection to writing inspired Bouhchichi to deliberate on the many writings that connect North Africa in general and Morocco in particular to the Indian Ocean and the lands beyond the eastern shores of that body of water. Even if some of these writings and traces are erased from the view of some, they still exist in other forms and can be read otherwise. Bouhchichi appropriates the braille system as a metaphor for that which is written otherwise. The texts in braille are excerpts from travel accounts of the renowned Amazigh-Moroccan traveller Abū ʿAbdallāh Muhammad ibn Battūta (1304–1368/1377) who is said to have travelled most of southern Europe and crossed the Afrasiatic Sea to Asia. These travels are dictated in his travelogue A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling (The Rihla), as well as text excerpts by another Amazigh-Moroccan Muslim scholar, Abu Al-Barakat Yusuf Al-Barbari, who is thought to have brought Islam to the Maldives.

Kelani Abass

Kelani Abass proposes an installation comprising Casing History, The Root Across the Walking Path, 1,2,3 (2022) and The root across the walking path (2022). The former is a sequel in his long-term research project of searching through archives. Abass’s mixed-media assemblages are made up of letterpress type-cases, historical photographs and handwritten notes from family archives that date back as far as the 1920s. One of his many points of departure is his family’s printing press and the way this medium of capturing information, stories, knowledges and histories ties together the familial (the micro) to the societal (the macro). Abass’s installation The root across the walking path considers water as a carrier of shared and individual histories and a player in the ecosystem of things, cultures, environments, bodies, travel, food and medicine. It is a reflection of water as an intrinsic part of people’s identities, cultural perceptions, religious beliefs and worldviews. Water is a relevant and significant variable that is also germane to the understanding of the Yoruba peoples’ identity, culture and religion. Abass states that “through images, text and intricate relationship with memory, my project will take its root from a family journal written in Yoruba, which dates as far back as 70 years of my family existence with recordings of events, child births, deaths, traditional invocations, evocation of powers, orthodox prescriptions, love potion recipes and autobiographies.”

John Njenga Karugia

The scholar Engseng Ho addresses creole kinship in his writing on the Hadrami diaspora and the distribution of inheritance as non-linear. These aspects also gain visibility in the long-term research journeys of John Njenga Karugia that emphasise on tributaries of memory cultures, aural inheritances and material legacies of sea-faring communities intercrossing between Kenya, Oman and Indonesia for centuries. His anecdotal archive of photographs and the documentary film Afrasian Memories in East Africa (2018) are on view, offering glimpses of what lies behind-the-scenes of scholarship, private contestations and coastal imaginings that might comprise the marginalia of what academia (re-)claims or rejects as part of “Ocean Studies”.

Rossella Biscotti

Transnational mobilities and immobilities in the oceanic sphere are shaped to a large degree through labour networks and plantation societies. Arunima Datta considers women’s migration experiences in colonial Malaya that extend a nuanced understanding of the lives of indentured Indian “coolie” women, problematising the stigmas and moralistic codes that accompanied imperial accounts. Thereby, providing a subjective view into how the South-East Asian archipelago’s gendered histories contributed to the empire of rubber. Rossella Biscotti commits to circulating biographical, botanical and literary encounters around banned and forgotten histories through her artistic work. In her “rubber works” – Annalies, Mei, Princess of Kasiruta, Sanikem - Nyai Ontosoroh - Madame Le Boucq, Surati (2019) she focuses on the four-volume novel The Buru Quartet (published gradually between 1980–1988) by acclaimed Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer, first expressed orally when the author was under detention in a camp on Buru island. Biscotti’s installation is inspired by five of its characters, one of which is based on the life of Surati, who contracts smallpox voluntarily in her efforts to escape subjection as a concubine under Dutch colonialism. In gleaning subjectivity from fragmented records, Biscotti weaves a lineage of feminist agency, ecological entanglements and potential affiliation. The use of Batik textile patterning upon translucent natural resin acts as a bodily imprint, recalling shared memory as well as rebellious, transient and disappearing voices.

Malala Andrialavidrazana

Malala Andrialavidrazana’s series of photomontages titled Figures (2015–ongoing) is a deep reflection on the problematics of cartography and the violence and finiteness of maps. As Lee Maracle aptly puts it in her poem Maps: “Maps are pretentious arrogantly purporting to know where everything is. Pretending power where none is. Maps are finite. Maps are always old.” Figures reads like an exhumation and recomposition of pictorial, symbolic and representational legacies. It brings together historical personalities alongside the faces of ordinary men and women whose roles, conditions and destinies have been overlooked across times and geographies. Fascinating both for their historical heft and their absurdities, they inform about political deviation, intellectual manipulation, systems of privilege and domination between genders, colours, classes or nations. It overlays the graphic reliefs of telegraphic cables, river systems and journeys of sacred philosophy with civilizational imagery of paradoxes and proximity. In Andrialavidrazana’s endeavour, one finds a path toward navigating collective truth and sovereign forms of place-making, echoing Kei Miller’s reflections in The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion:
to anticipate the ironic
question: how did we find
ourselves here? My job is
to untangle the tangled,
to unworry the concerned,
to guide you out from cul-de-sacs
into which you may have wrongly turned.

Sim Chi Yin

“The world is running out of sand. It seems counter-intuitive but sand, besides air and water, is our most used commodity”, reflects Sim Chi Yin. In the adjacent room, her photographic installation and VR narrative chronicles the movement and depletion of this non-renewable resource from Vietnam’s Mekong Delta and across Asia (in particular China, Malaysia and Singapore) through a desire for frenzied urbanisation, the development of new metropolitan areas and a constant drive for land reclamation that transforms coastlines. The transit of sand piles across rivers, into container ships and storage sites in construction areas, is often plotted by Sim through aerial imaging. This approach creates a different scalar and spatial perspective from which to comprehend mining and trading processes. The newly-produced work Garden of No Return (2023) weaves together lullabies and laments as well as poetry written and narrated by Vietnamese writer Khải Đơn to grapple with detrimental effects of landslides and large-scale erosion which destroys homes, livestock and ancestral shrines. Sim Chi Yin, together with Dan Archer, creates an experiential terrain that uses photogrammetry imagery and filmed sequences while also allowing for leaps into the poetic and uncanny to allude to communal losses and extreme precarity in the global business flows of sand mining.

Oscar Murillo

Oscar Murillo’s series surge (social cataracts) (2019–ongoing) invokes the aesthetics of Claude Monet’s paintings of water lilies to reflect on the plethora of signifiers that bodies of water connote. No matter how gentle some waters are, their undercurrents seem to tell other stories. Murillo’s social cataracts seem to unravel the stories told by the undercurrents. It is difficult to think of the bodies of water that connect the African continent to the rest of the world without bearing witness to traumas that lay underneath the swirling waves. As Amiri Baraka put it: “At the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean there’s a railroad made of human bones.” Murillo uses stitched-together patches of canvas, broad agitated strokes of blue, green, red, yellow paint to express the voices of the undercurrents. This suite also reminds us of the hydrological cycle and processes of weathering that connect rain clouds with the bottom of the sea. Although Murillo takes his cue for this series from the story of Monet’s suffering from cataracts when he painted the water lilies, the work itself invites us to think of the colonial enterprise as an impairment of vision that still throws a dense cloud over humanity — thus coloniality is a social cataract. With the enthralling beauty of these paintings, we are reminded that despite all the odds, waters still connect, waters transcend borders, disrespect maps and are the life-bearers of the planet. As Fela Kuti put it: “water no get enemy”.

“as if there is a path where beings truly meet, as if I am rounding the human corners”
— Linda Hogan, The Turtle Watchers (2008)