Sancintya Mohini Simpson’s landscape paintings of histories of colonial exploitation are deeply connected to family memories and intergenerational healing. A descendent of indentured labourers sent from India to work on colonial sugar plantations in South Africa, the artist confronts — through her practice — traumas echoing through her matrilineal ancestry, as well as wider histories of displacement through indentured labour. Her work honours those forced to make impossible journeys of migration and recognises the suffering that travels through generations.

kūlī / khulā 2024, commissioned for this Triennial, explores indenture and resilience. In the work, Simpson interconnects stories of indentured women and the relationships between them, interspersed within a landscape littered with references to operations across the colonies. Simpson confronts the stereotypes perpetuated in colonial archival accounts and privileges the lives and stories of the individual women and their surviving interconnections.