Holding Space

Heidi McKenzie’s exhibition, Reclaimed: Indo-Caribbean Herstories, opened at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto May 3-August 27. It is part of a series McKenzie has created on ancestry, belonging and the complexity of identity, especially for mixed-race people such as herself, with Indo-Caribbean antecedents. As she herself expresses it, “I grew up on the East Coast of Canada, one of a handful of brown faces in a sea of white, at the corners of ‘Canadianness’. Holding space and making place for people of color matters. Telling my family’s stories matter.”

The exhibition has three distinct components:

(i) Holding Ancestry consists of ten photographic portraits of contemporary Indo-Caribbean women, in settings and clothing of their choice, each holding a photograph of a female ancestor, accompanied by videos in which each subject narrates the story of her ancestor and/or herself. These portraits, photographed by Heidi, have been transferred onto porcelain tiles, hand-rolled by her, and lit from behind. Arresting images that stop you in your tracks as you enter the exhibition. Who are they? What are they saying? They demand engagement with their images, as the spectator is drawn into participation, stories unfurling using QR codes.

(ii) Looking back takes us to two hanging windows featuring images of “Coolie Belles,” again on porcelain tiles, in the style of early 20^th century postcards by photographers such as Felix Morin. These popular postcards of the time, accessed from the Montgomery collection at the Royal Ontario Museum as well the personal collection of Amar Wahab, a professor at York University, display portraits of Indo-Caribbean women, ornately dressed in colorful saris and other Indian garments, wearing elaborate jewelry. The images are far from the everyday lives of such women, bound to labor in the cane fields, their wages of silver shillings transformed into what has become known as the jewelry of indenture. The windows also contain other postcards displaying sugar canes and other ephemera of plantation life.

(iii) Coinage, Bangle and Crescent Moon form a set of three abstract sculptures, displayed along with selected pieces from the rare collection of such jewelry collected by the late Evelyne Rayman, and now held by her daughter Lancelyn Rayman-Watters. These three gorgeously colored pieces respond to the jewelry and the photographs, and in concept and shape are strikingly original.

Within her body of work, McKenzie has used archives before and in an artist’s statement on this exhibition, discusses the influence of Palestinian cultural theorist and philosopher, Ariella Azoulay and her notions of photography as an encounter, really a series of negotiations between subjects, photographers and viewers. Azoulay has also theorized about archives as living historical repositories, stressing the urgent need to bring them into dialogue with subjects implicated by the knowledge they contain, especially in the case of under-represented subjects. Such subjects might discover a history previously unknown to them, and the case of Indo-Caribbean subjects is a glaring example. Part of Heidi McKenzie’s stated intention is to make the invisible visible, as in the case of her Indo-Caribbean female ancestors whose labor exploitation is only part of their history of oppression, the collective amnesia surrounding the everyday conditions of their lives preventing a proper reckoning even today.

Reclaimed, states McKenzie, is an exhibition which embodies a deliberate act of reclamation and decolonization. Her activist intent here is to reveal the hidden history of Indo-Caribbean indenture, but also to proclaim the courage and resistance with which the women involved faced adversity and created imaginative solutions for transforming the lives of generations to come. Most of these women were outcasts from their society for different reasons including the accident of widowhood for which their bad karma was often blamed; their independence and refusal to remain passive in the face of domestic abuse often leading to dire consequences. The Looking Back segment subverts the intention of the early tourist-type postcards by juxtaposing them with images of cane land and everyday objects of plantation life. The trope of the woman in the window, widely used for signaling female transactional/sexual availability is further subverted by the excessive jewelry worn by the bedecked women, once the history of that jewelry is known – its creation through extreme toil yielding the silver coins that were refashioned, and its practical purpose as a system of banking by workers who had no ready access to the colonial banking system.

The panelists spoke to a packed house and a lively discussion followed. Personally, I was amazed and enthralled by the eagerness with which the audience, most of them young people, joined the discussion and the chatter afterwards. There was a hunger for information, and a sense of dismay at their lack of knowledge of their own history, a feeling I had also registered a month before at the opening on May 3rd. It seemed that this exhibition had touched a nerve in so many attendees and I left feeling hopeful that more exploration of Indo-Caribbean realities would be the result. In the meantime, Heidi McKenzie’s work is moving along rapidly. She is the only Canadian, and one of only 34 artists globally to be invited to the Indian Ceramics Triennale in 2024, to be held in Delhi, where she will present new work drawn from the ancestral photographs of the ten women in Holding Ancestry – only this time weaving a visual tapestry to accompany their video stories.

Reclaimed: Indo-Caribbean Herstories was featured at the Gardiner Museum until August 27, 2023.