LITTLE-KNOWN HISTORIES OF GIRMITIYAS REVEALED

Reclaimed: Indo-Caribbean HerStories, part of the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, opens at the Gardiner Museum on May 4. The exhibition highlights the complex, longstanding, and often unpredictable interplay between ceramics and photography.

Toronto-based artist Heidi McKenzie explores the stories of Indo-Caribbean women and their descendants in Canada, including her own family, by reconsidering archival imagery and traditional jewellery forms through the lens of photography on translucent porcelain.

In 1833, the end of the legal trade in enslaved people in the British Empire prompted the rise of indentured labour in the Caribbean, particularly among people from India, up to 20 percent of whom were

women. Archival studio photography from the late 19th and early 20th centuries documents these women, bedecked with ornate, layered jewellery worn to assert status and as a form of currency and cultural expression.

Reclaimed: Indo-Caribbean HerStories takes inspiration from archival and family images to explore how descendants of “coolie belles” in Canada today connect to stories of their matrilineal ancestors. The three main elements of the installation—ceramic sculptures viewed alongside historical jewellery; contemporary portraits printed with ceramic pigments and fired onto translucent porcelain; and archival images on porcelain suspended in frames—approach these stories from different points of entry.

“In the GTA nearly one in five people are of South Asian origin. A quarter of us are of Caribbean descent, yet we, much like our stories, are invisible,” says McKenzie. “Many of our parents and grandparents did not discuss, acknowledge, or even know the facts of indentureship. The women—widows or social outcasts—came alone. They were often illiterate, so they wore their banks on their bodies. They earned a few shillings a day, only if they reached their two-ton quota of sugarcane, out of which they had fashioned silver bangles, necklaces, and other jewellery. Later it was the women who fought for increased wages, better working conditions, and an end to child labour on the plantations. Their strength, courage, and defiance paved the way to prosperity and emigration to Canada.”

When and where: Reclaimed: Indo-Caribbean HerStories will be on view in the lobby of the Gardiner Museum, Toronto from May 4 to August 27, 2023. For more information, visit gardinermuseum.com.