Editor’s Note: This article has been updated for accuracy since the original post.
Walking into the Ford Foundation’s large doors in Manhattan for the first time, I’m one of the first to be trickling in for an event I’ve been anticipating — Andil Gosine and Rajiv Mohabir: A Pride Love-Up Moderated by Tzarina Prater. This is the first in a series of events connected to the exhibition on display at the Ford Foundation Gallery just downstairs, curated by Andil Gosine, everything slackens in a wreck, featuring artworks from artists Margaret Chen, Andrea Chung, Wendy Nanan and Kelly Sinnapah Mary who share a lineage of indentureship in the Caribbean. At first, it almost feels like I’m in the wrong place — the large towering building with a grand entrance and people greeting you at a desk near the elevators is very different from the cozy, familiar gathering spaces in Queens. However, knowing the energy of these incredible pieces are within the same four walls as I am, while listening to two gay Indo-Caribbean authors exchange passages from each other’s books, I’m filled with an indescribable feeling of joy, reverence, ancestral and generational bittersweetness and most of all – a sense of belonging.
A week or so after meeting at the event, Andil and I chat over Zoom. In such a small and connected community, I’m in such deep gratitude to be building – professionally and personally – with someone whose work has been recognized on a global scale, and recently profiled in the New York Times. Chatting with Andil feels like a home away from home, like reconnection despite talking for only the second time. Each answer breathes new life and inspiration into my own inquiries, fascinations and creative practice. Hearing the names of our long-time friends and family at Jahajee Sisters, familiar cultural workers and creatives, and learning of new artists to explore reminds me why we do this work: we’re reaching for home, and one place we find that in our passions and our community.
Lissa Deonarain: Thank you so much for agreeing to do this. And it was great to meet you in person at the event. It’s really exciting, especially during Pride month and Caribbean American Heritage Month to be connecting. I guess we’ll start with your journey. Just tell me about yourself and your background and the work you do.
Andil Gosine: I’m a professor of Environmental Arts and Justice at York University, where I’ve been in that role for a few years. My academic training was mostly social science-based, in international development and environmental studies. And I also have a degree in Latin American Caribbean Studies. [I] got into the arts about a decade ago. I had come to New York, really, with a plan to do some work on fashion. And in that moment encountered the West Indian artist Lorraine O’Grady. Over the course of time, I thought I was doing work in fashion and then realized really it was more visual art that I was working on.
This exhibition really begins in 2012. I was sent to review an exhibition at Queens Museum called Caribbean: Crossroads of the World. There was an incredible collection of Caribbean art [that] was thrown up on the walls of the Queens Museum, really quite a lot of wonderful work. But, at the same time, I was struck by the fact that the only representations of Indo-Caribbean people, Indo-Guyanese people who comprised the large community around the museum, was a single photograph called Anonymous Coolie Woman by Colonial French Photographer. That kind of disconnect between what was going on inside the museum and what’s outside the museum really weighed on me. So I commented about that in the critique in the review for Art in America and then I set off to investigate myself. First, I was making work at the same time trying to learn about other folks’ work. So for a few years, I had a couple of exhibitions, one called Coolie, Coolie Viens [in] 2016, ’17 and ’18. Between 2015 and 2019, I had a project called Visual Art After Indenture in which I set out to investigate, “Who are the artists who come from this lineage of indenture, this shared historical experience of having ancestors who were indentured workers or part of the indentureship project and what were they doing?” I actually ended up with about a collection of 80 artists.
From that in 2018, I started to think of different exhibitions and the artist I first worked with was Wendy Nanan and curated a solo show of her work at the Art Museum of the Americas in D.C. Although unfortunately, it went up the day that everything was shut down, so the original, beautiful version of this exhibition was up for a year — I think almost a year and a half — and no one ever saw it. Then an abridged version was shown later on, but it wasn’t quite the same thing that I had imagined. I approached the Ford Foundation Gallery with the project for everything slackens in a wreck and here we are!
LD: I loved seeing the environmental arts piece, my mom and my step-dad both work in environmental science, so I grew up around two environmentalists.
AG: I grew up with an orientation to environmental justice too. I think when I was a child, every time we went to the beach in Trinidad, the first thing you did was offer a flower of thanks to the ocean. Then, there was so much parts of daily lives, which are about just a continuous reverence for nature, but also resistance to over-consuming — using things again, eating locally — all the things that have fancier names and frameworks now, but are really part of daily life. I really think my maternal grandmother in particular was oriented toward environmental justice and as a child, that was a big influence. So, by the time I was 16, I knew I never wanted to own a car, for instance. Even though I could drive, I didn’t want one because of its huge environmental impact. So yeah, I think it goes back a long way. And there’s also an urban, rural divide, and a wealth divide. You develop those environmental practices because you had to reuse things over and over. I mean, Trinidad is an extremely wasteful place — one of the highest polluting per capita places in the world — so this is not to glamorize Trinidad. There are things about growing up in a rural space and not wealthy that make you cognizant of your relationship to nature that other folks maybe get to take for granted.
LD: Touching on that, how does your identity influence the work that you do and like who do you do this work for?
AG: As an artist and as a writer, I think I principally am doing work really to try to understand myself, but understanding myself is an unpacking of my psychic make-up, one that’s formed by social history. So if I want to understand myself, I also want to understand how I’m also a product of these long historical relationships. One of the things that struck me at the beginning, my first projects — very, very typical kind of artist practice — I was experiencing heartbreak. I was processing it through art. This was about a heartbreak of a relationship that took place mostly in France for years. Half of it was in France and half of it was in Canada. What struck me is that, somehow whenever I was making things, the things that were coming out of me in this moment…anyone who’s gone through a heartbreak, you feel so intense. And in that intensity, I kept reaching back for this longer history. The first four pieces that came out of the project were a cutlass broach, an urni headscarf, a set of scrubs featuring prints of my parents, and a bag, a satchel, a rum and roti satchel. Looking back now, I think , “Ah!” The relationship for someone who has migrated so many times, relationships become homes and when they fall apart, you go reaching for home. So it’s not that surprising that I would reach for these for some kind of home experience, when I lost what had been a home for a decade.
This project is for many people. It’s an answer to that moment of Queens Museum. To go into that museum and see this tiny photograph, and then to walk into my exhibition the first thing you see is this giant painting of an Indo-Caribbean woman. I mean that in itself is an answer. It’s an embrace of the larger community in Queens. It’s a rejection of its exclusion from so many domains. At the same time, at the core, this is a project about how we live as humans, how we deal in moments of crisis. The thing I always say to my students is, your main task as an artist is to seek out and interrogate a truth about yourself. You can’t do that without thinking about social history. You’re never produced or existing outside of social relationships. If you really seek out and interrogate parts of your humanity, your artwork will connect with others and will be for others. So it’s been wonderful to see. Of course I’m really touched by how enthusiastic that Queens community has been about the project. I was so happy to see how brown that opening was in New York. That was pretty unusual for a Manhattan opening to see so many people come out. I was really touched how many people came out from Queens. Then along with that is to see the exhibition connect with someone from the UK, someone from Hong Kong. People are seeing that really, it’s about our human experience. Art is about exploring the human condition and usually white artists get to tell these very personal stories and, and expect that, “Well, it’s supposed to connect. Everyone’s supposed to be able to relate,” and I think we need to do that too. We need to be able to say, “Let us tell specific details of our stories and assume that if we do a good job of investigating our humanity, it will be for everyone.” We explain because we’re forced to. My first solo exhibition in Canada, Coolie, Coolie Viens, was in a mostly white community that it was staged. One of the main things that was in that exhibition were these photographs I had taken of people who went to the first Indo-Caribbean Alliance Gala in 2013. That gala experiment was such a wonderful experience.
People look at this exhibition and there’s a long story and many steps getting to the Ford Foundation Gallery. One of those critical steps was at the 2013 Indo Caribbean [Alliance] Gala in Jamaica, Queens. Richard David, always a very enthusiastic supporter, had set aside this room in the basement of the Jamaica Performing Arts Center, where I set up a photo studio and there was a very large backdrop of sugarcane. I invited people to take photographs in front of sugarcane. These photographs have since circulated in different places. People looked gorgeous. They’re really gorgeous photographs. So I put some of these photographs up in the museum, in the gallery, where I showed Coolie, Coolie Viens. The curator there was like, “Can you record something so people understand it and so that when people come in, they’ll know what this is?” And I was thinking…upstairs in the other gallery, you have abstract art by white artists with no explanation. Just lines and colors. This is just photographs of people standing in front of sugarcane. Why do you need an explanation? Why are we forced always to assume the audience is gonna walk in and think “Oh God, I don’t know what’s going on! I see brown bodies, this isn’t about me!” Why also are we imagining one kind of audience?
It was deliberate with everything slackens in a wreck not to have too much explanation. Even the didactic, the wall text, is relatively short. None of the pieces have labels on them. This is about experiencing at a whole finding your own connection, you know? And if you want to look further, there’s a section with books you can read! But we shouldn’t be patronizing about art audiences and we should be opening it up to not just imagining it as a white subject and who goes into galleries. I want families to go into galleries. Because of where Queens Museum is, I had hoped that one day they would have art shows that are reflective of the community. Kids love seeing those sculptures by Kelly Sinnapah Mary. They’re weird and they’re intriguing. Every kid has walked into that gallery and wants to talk about them. They look into the face of her paintings and are like, “Why is there a tiger there?” Or the bright colors of Wendy Nanan’s works or this giant bird’s nest that Andrea Chung has built and also Margaret Chen’s work. These are all works that people want to know more about, but they can also find their own relationship to it.
LD: So in terms of the exhibition, how did you connect with all of these artists?
AG: I had done research on trying to find not just [artists] in the Caribbean, North America, but also found artists in Fiji, in Mauritius, in the UK. These four artists are not exactly the “the best,” — there’s not really a best in art. There’s just different kinds of art. But for me, it was about a concept. I like a very poetic sensibility. I want something that has a lot of space and I wanted the works to be related to each other. There are all the elements of nature in that room. Krishna is in the sky. There’s the earth of Margaret Chen and Andrea Chung’s pieces, the sugarcane. There’s the sea represented by the shells in Margaret’s work and Wendy’s work and of course we have the forest of Kelly Sinnapah Mary’s work. For me, this was about creating this feel of the environment, situating ourselves almost inside a Caribbean environment — and not beaches. This is sort of like a window into the daily environment of many Caribbean people. These are the things that are around for some people, there’s a lot of bush. For some people, there are cityscapes. Even the built environment is represented in Kelly’s work and to some extent in Wendy’s Idyllic Marriage. Because I grew up in a rural place, I was thinking of the natural elements. I had already been researching these four artists. Kelly Sinnapah Mary and I met almost a decade ago and have worked on various projects since then, so we have always had this ongoing relationship. Similarly, it had been years of work researching Wendy Nanan for her solo exhibition. Then of course, these new relationships with Margaret Chen and Andrea Chung, whose work I had learned about, were artists I hadn’t worked with before. The one silver lining about the pandemic in relationship to this exhibition is that it gave us time to commission new works. We wouldn’t have had Kelly’s beautiful paintings or Andrea’s impressive nest if this exhibition opened when it should have in 2020. With the extra lead time and the postponement, we were able to commission these beautiful new works. I get really involved as a curator, so they involved a lot of dialogue. I mean, they’re brilliant artists. You choose to work with brilliant artists. You trust they’ll make brilliant work and they did.
LD: I think the nest is one of my favorite ones in there.
AG: Yeah. I mean that is just a beautiful piece. And then the title House of Historians adds so much more. And of course that sugarcane has a special place in my heart because it took months of constant reminders that the people I found in Trinidad to cut the sugar cane.
LD: Oh, so it’s all from people in Trinidad?
AG: The sugar cane itself? Oh yeah. I mean we tried in North America to get that sugarcane. We contacted every factory in North America that deals with sugarcane and the problem is the way it’s processed. You don’t have these long pieces of bark. You just have…grated pieces at the end because it’s put through machines and then I guess sifted? Andrea wanted that bark, so I had to end up calling people I know in Princes Town, Trinidad. It started off by finding out there’s a guy who sells liquid sugar in Princes Town Market that my uncle had told me about, and then we ended up hiring two people to cut sugarcane. Of course, it was a pandemic there too, so it was a long, long process. We’d send four bags and say, “Please fill these with dried sugarcane bark and grass from the sugarcane.” In the sculpture, you also see pieces of grass and that’s also from them. That was almost months of daily calls by me checking to see if it would be done and they did a beautiful job, but it was a lot of time.
LD: That’s amazing. I was wondering how the materials for that were sourced.
AG: Very, very personal. Very, very personal experience. I mean I can’t imagine working with a better institution. Ford, the gallery director and the exhibitions coordinator were just incredible because they trusted my vision. They trusted the artists. They dealt with us all so respectfully. Then that’s what you get at the end because there’s this experience of trust and love and it produces something beautiful.
LD: Speaking of that, what’s your favorite way or your favorite thing about how the pieces interact with each other to create this space and support each other?
AG: The space itself, the amount of space you have between them, allows you to find all kinds of connections as an audience to see things between them. One thing that often has happened is that people think some of the pieces are by the same artist. Often they go like, “Margaret uses shells, Wendy uses shells. Is this by the same artist?” And then others will think that Margaret Chen’s pieces and Andrea Chung’s pieces are by the same artist or, they don’t think Kelly did both the sculptures and the paintings. What it is a sign of for me is people finding within this environment their own relationships of the work and finding relationships between the work.
The best moment of feeling in this whole project — it’s really an installation. We were struggling with where to put the Baby Krishna, because it was such a bright color. It didn’t quite fit with everything else. Then we found that spot at the top because Krishna is flying. Why wouldn’t he be high above? When it connected to put Krishna up in the spot that he is, it’s actually spaced exactly against Wendy Nanan’s other piece, Idyllic Marriage, which is the grounding. If Wendy Nanan’s piece is about the fact of creolization, that we’re all these different people who must live together and it’s gonna have tension sometimes, and it’s gonna be hard sometimes, then you have Krishna — Christianized Krishna, because this Krishna has angel wings and a halo — it’s like an aspiration of the best of creolization: the fact that we can feel like we’re flying when we’re listening to Soca music or Chutney music or having the food that we love or being in each other’s company or telling jokes. That’s what, for me, the Krishna is symbolic of. So putting it up high is about this kind of aspiration of what we do become in the Caribbean.
LD: What have you learned from working with artists from different indentured origins all coming together around this shared history?
AG: I think one of the reasons I focused on indenture rather than, say, Indo-Caribbean is because there’s nothing particular about how we’re born into our bodies that make us anything, but what bonds us are communities’ shared historical experiences. It was interesting to me to find and think about these artists who share this historical experience of coming from this history of indenture. What themes might emerge from their work? What connections might they have? In fact, the very first event, which is also like a precedent for this exhibition, was a conference workshop in 2016 that I held at York University called Visual Arts After Indenture. Wendy was there and there were artists from New York, South Africa, the UK, Trinidad, Guyana. So there were all these different scholars and artists who had come together to talk about this. It was really interesting to find resonance visually. You can see some of the connections between the work. One British artist who’s in the BNL right now, his name is [Shiraz] Bayjoo. He’s from Mauritius and he does these paintings. You’ll see some of the same tropes like ships. You’ll see some of the language, some of the creolisms are the same, some of the different ways people make food. But with art, you see both the continuities and discontinuities. You see a concern with the violence and that is part of the heritage of indentureship. Indentureship, it’s a relatively small community of people in the grand scheme of things.
For example, in Toronto, when the Caribbean community was the dominant “other” community, Indo-Caribbean peoples were a big part of that landscape. It was a couple of Guyanese workers who started Asian Heritage Month in the city. Now when Asian Heritage Month happens, you barely see any representation of it because they’ve been dwarfed just by the numbers. South Asia has a much bigger place than these little tiny pockets of indenture. So for a lot of these artists, there’s also a struggle to want to be seen. One of the things I write about in Wasafiri [is] the fact that because everyone sort of grows up feeling like, “I don’t know my history. I’m alone.” I luckily grew up in Trinidad where it’s integrated into the curriculum. I was 11 years old and had done like a 30 page report on indentureship. That was part of growing up in Trinidad. But if you grew up somewhere else, like in Guadalupe, Kelly has never encountered a single thing about her history in the books. It’s disconnected. So I was, in trying to build these links, to give a sense [that] actually there’s a lot of information out there. You don’t have to feel like you’re starting from zero. It’s always exciting to see each generation with a sense like, “Oh, we’re discovering this,” but part of it is that you feel like everyone is discovering the same information. It would be nice to have a sense of continuity. So putting these artists together is always also a sense of saying, “Hey, there’s work done. There’s other people doing this work. You’re not alone.”
LD: How have you seen and what is the importance of art being used as a tool for storytelling and change-making and healing, especially for people with lineages of indenture?
AG: Yeah, art is this beautiful space that allows us to register our deepest feelings and to explore them and find the truth about ourselves. Really, almost all social problems come back to, often, how we feel about ourselves. We talked about overconsumption earlier. Why do a lot of people buy lots of things they don’t need? To fill something that’s missing. I’m one of those people. Everyone does it. It’s how we’ve learned to live in consumer society. Actually for me, in a very personal way, turning to art practice and curation has similarly provided this kind of source of nourishment because I’m getting to dig into what’s really going on. The feeling of exile or exclusion that a lot of people feel, art becomes a way in which one can deal with those feelings of loneliness in the subconscious and by recognizing them, heal them. I have to say with artmaking and even curation, I don’t have a goal that’s very clear, that’s set in mind. I’m reaching for beauty, that’s for sure. I’m reaching to make something beautiful and I’m seeking to find truths and deal with them. If we can do that, that will help us with all of the other things. Art is part of a landscape of many things. Art can’t replace the work of a social worker or the work of a teacher, a janitor, a food worker. Art is something that’s different, but intellectually becomes a way in which we can really come to grips with difficult questions. I think sharing those experiences has been really fruitful in many contexts. I think there’s a lot of possibility with art.
I was so happy to work with Simone and the rest of the Jahajee Sisters. I was so moved by their enthusiastic participation and also just the beauty of the audio they submitted. As, I think, probably the most important Indo-Caribbean group that’s been in the city over the last decade, it was just really important to have them present in some way. In informing the exhibition for me, it’s really about the visual concept. How do these things fit? It wasn’t really, “I need someone from this country. I need someone from that country.” It has to be more poetic than that. The opportunity came to recreate what was a one person performance as this group experience, because this Jahajee (Ouverture), originally I was going to perform for a different museum that got canceled over the pandemic, in which I create a soundscape doing things that women in my life taught me to do. So I thought, “Well, this can be a community project.” It was just really wonderful. I love seeing people in the garden stop to listen. I love the audio they produced. I’m just really pleased that they’re on the wall, the Jahajee Sisters.
LD: Sometimes the goal of just creating something beautiful and seeking truth is enough and then trusting that those who it reaches and those who you hope it reaches, or you hope that it relates to will take the inspiration from that and continue on this legacy of what you started with and build it to its own beautiful thing.
AG: I see it already. This kind of work, it’s been crucial in creating a field of Visualities of Indentureship. There was not this work when I went to that show at Queens Museum. You mentioned Renluka [Maharaj]. When Renluka started working with those photographs, we had a very long conversation about them. Michelle Mohabeer made a film called Queer Coolie-tudes. This was all part of seeing how the space was opening up. My first exhibition was 2011 at FIT — I mean “exhibition”…I was just reporting the things I made — that’s when I first shared things. From that point on, I did performances in Queens and Toronto and held exhibitions. So over that time, you just see some folks and you feel like, “I can do this too.” Then alongside the visual art, lots of people like Rajiv Mohabir and others are writing brilliant books. Lisa Outar and Gabrielle Hosein edited that terrific collection with a lot of newer generation scholars, Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought. There’s this moment in which you’re seeing things grow.
everything slackens in a wreck is open at the Ford Foundation Gallery until August 20. You can find more about the artists here:
Andil Gosine – website / instagram
Margaret Chen – website
Andrea Chung – website / instagram
Wendy Nanan – website / facebook