Event Sancintya Mohini Simpson (Women’s History Month)

Sancintya Mohini Simpson (Women’s History Month)

First Thursdays

05 March 2020
7–10pm

Join IMA Belltower artist Sancintya Mohini Simpson and her collaborators as they take over the IMA courtyard with an evening of performance that brings together language, gesture, and ritual to invoke the stories of women forgotten by colonial histories.

See performances by Joella Warkill, Manisha Anjali, Shivanjani Lal, Sancintya Mohini Simpson, and Isha Ram Das, as they share connected familial histories marked by the colonial sugar industry’s system of indenture.

The night will give voice to the performers’ ancestors—women who journeyed across oceans to be bound by sugar plantations.

Guest Info
  • Manisha Anjali

    Manisha Anjali is a Fiji-born writer and artist. Her practice and research is rooted in the language of dreams and exile. She is the author of Electric Lotus (Incendium Radical Library Press, 2019). Manisha has exhibited at Bus Projects, c3 contemporary art space, SEVENTH Gallery, Melbourne Writers Festival, Queensland Poetry Festival, Emerging Writers Festival, and Digital Writers Festival. She is the producer of Neptune: a dream archive and the Poetry Editor at The Lifted Brow.

    Isha Ram Das

    Isha Ram Das is a composer and sound artist primarily concerned with ecologies of environment and culture. He works with experimental sound techniques to produce performances, installations, and recordings. In collaboration with sibling Sancintya Mohini Simpson, Das responds to his familial history of displacement to create an ongoing oral archive through performance. He was the 2019 recipient of the Lionel Gell Award for Composition, and has scored feature-length films and nationally-touring theatre installations. He has performed at institutions such as the Sydney Opera House; Black Dot Gallery, Melbourne; Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; Metro Arts, Brisbane; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; and Boxcopy, Brisbane.

    Shivanjani Lal

    Shivanjani Lal is a twice removed Fijian Indian Australian Artist and arts worker. She is from the indentured labour diaspora of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. She works across mediums to explore her dislocation that seeks to account for memory, erasure, healing, and the archive. Her work is for the women in her family. She holds a degree in Politics from the University of Wollongong, and a degree in Design Arts majoring in Photomedia and Visual Arts. Since 2013 Lal has exhibited nationally, and internationally. Last year Lal was the recipient of the 2019 Create NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship.

    Sancintya Mohini Simpson

    Sancintya Mohini Simpson is an artist and researcher based in Brisbane, Australia. Her practice addresses the impact of colonisation on the historical and lived experiences of her family, and more broadly traces the movements and passages of indentured labourers from India to South Africa during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Her interdisciplinary practice draws on the archive to explore the complexities of migration, memory, and trauma. Simpson’s work moves between painting and video, to poetry and performance, developing narratives and rituals, which she uses to navigate family history, and embed wider narratives surrounding the Indian indenture diaspora community.

    Joella Warkill

    Joella Warkill is a proud First Nations and South Sea Islander woman. Reigning from ancestors of Pentecost and Ambrym Islands in Vanuatu, and the Yidinji people in Far North Queensland, she often writes/speaks to empower, heal, and represent those who see themselves in her stories. Warkill is an undergraduate student studying a Bachelor of Creative Industries and Bachelor of Human Services, majoring in Creative Writing at QUT. She also works at BlakDance, and when she is not working or studying she can often be found performing poetry around Brisbane, sometimes with Digi Youth Arts. Warkill hopes to continue to use her creativity to impact younger generations and enhance the representation of people of colour and First Nations in the arts.

Sancintya Mohini Simpson, 'Cleansing Ritual’, performance documentation, Metro Arts, 2018. Photograph: Savannah van der Niet.

Related Exhibition

Sancintya Mohini Simpson

Kūlī Nām Dharāyā / They’ve Given You the Name ‘Coolie’

22 Feb–25 Jul 2020

Similar Events

04 July 201904 Jul 2019

FEMIOKE

First Thursdays

05 April 201805 Apr 2018

Digi Youth Arts

First Thursdays

05 July 201805 Jul 2018

Elisa Jane Carmichael

First Thursdays

24 August 201724 Aug 2017

LA 2017

Fujui Wang & Felicia Atkinson

19 June 201419 Jun 2014

OtherFilm

Luther Price

07 August 201407 Aug 2014

Stuart Ringholt with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

In Conversation