Sancintya Mohini Simpson’s landscape paintings are deeply connected to family memories and intergenerational healing. A descendant of indentured labourers sent from India to work on colonial sugar plantations in South Africa, the artist confronts traumas echoing through her matrilineal ancestry, as well as wider histories of displacement through indenture. Simpson’s work is informed by an archive of photographs and texts she has carefully collected and studied to uncover clandestine accounts of such histories, as well as by miniature painting approaches she learnt in India, and the mobile and everyday forms of Indian scroll painting created by families in villages away from the wealthy courts.

Composed on sheets of handmade wasli paper, kūlī / khulā 2024 recounts stories of indentured women and the relationships between them, interspersed with references to operations across the colonies. The characters, particularly the women included, are painted with intimate care and attention, imaging not only the labour, violence and betrayals of bonded ownership, but also the women’s love and friendship and their connection to distant homes and cultures. In doing so, Simpson confronts the stereotypes perpetuated in colonial archival accounts, and privileges the lives and stories of the individual women and their surviving interconnections.