The flows of people and plants circulated through the routes of early European colonialism open the exhibition. Expanding on maps that simplify the “Columbian Exchange,” Connie Zheng’s Routes/Roots attempts to record the ways in which colonialism, slavery, and capitalistic enterprise have shaped the foods we eat and consider ‘native’ and how related human activities have transformed landscapes. Named after Christopher Columbus, the “Columbian Exchange” is the widespread transfer of plants and other material and non-material things between the so-called New (the Americas) and Old (Afro-Eurasia) Worlds. Valuable for food, medicine, and other industries, plants were a powerful motivator for colonial exploration and occupation. Carl Beam’s Columbus and Bees contrasts the power ascribed to figures such as Columbus against irrefutable natural forces, such as pollinators, without which plants and all that rely on them couldn’t exist. Beam’s New World suggests the disconnect between Indigenous and colonial conceptions of land and authority. Hank Willis Thomas’ A Place to Call Home illustrates the real and symbolic terms through which disparate geographical locations are deeply entwined. Thomas’ map connects North America with Africa, inextricably tying the enslavement of African people with the establishment of the United States and Canada.
Moving from the spatial geography of colonial activities to its human geography, several works present natural elements as a way to symbolize the enmeshment of bodies with the landscapes they have moved across and toiled upon. In Deborah Jack’s Foremothers, salt materializes extraction and displacement as a constituent element of oceans, land, and the bodies and tears of trafficked Africans. A human form is placed centrally in Candice Lin’s La Charada China, embedded into a slab of earth, seeds, and plants—as interconnected as colonial expansion. Dinh Q. Lê’s The Colony was filmed on the Chincha islands in Peru, where colonies of birds leave mountains of excrement, or guano, which is subsequently extracted as a fertilizer. Monocultural plantation agriculture depletes soil, necessitating the use of such fertilizers. The abject process of hand mining the toxic material from cliffs was carried out by indentured Chinese labourers, many of whom died amid exploitative and unsafe labour practices.
Today, numerous aspects of our day-to-day lives are linked to structures invented or instrumentalized to limit the freedoms of racialized people in favour of colonial capitalism. Carrie Mae Weems confronts the falsehood of institutional neutrality in From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, through a deep reading of photographs of an enslaved family staged and commissioned in 1850 by a Harvard professor invested in eugenics. With trenchant prose layered over the images that she has tinted an emblematic red, Weems witnesses the humanity of the sitters under scientific abuse. Theories of racial difference, foundational to medical racism, support the maintenance of colonial power. The “miasma” in the title of Bo Wang’s and Lu Pan’s Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings was a theory of bad air that was exploited by the British stationed in Hong Kong after the opium wars. Through erroneously asserting that disease in tropical places hung in the air around native inhabitants, the British ghettoized communities and appropriated prime land for themselves. Minerva Cuevas’s Del Montte—Bananeras subverts the familiar fruit sticker to point to the collusion between corrupt officials and multi-national fruit companies headquartered in Europe and the United States in the exploitation of workers, the environment, and Indigenous communities, which has been enabled by a long history of U.S. imperialism and opportunism in low-and middle-income countries. In Andrea Chung’s Proverbs 12:22, bibles encased in sugar draw together the relationship between the manipulation of religion and language and the control and coercion of the enslaved on sugar plantations.
Under the long shadows cast by racial and plantation capitalism, how can we conceive of racial identity? Aria Dean and Inyang Essien construct self-definition from the shade of history. The crop most strongly associated with enslavement and plantation agriculture is cotton. In the guise of a stem of cotton, Aria Dean’s Dead Zone (4) is an internet signal jammer that prevents the internet access needed to post images of her work. In an era when images of Black people, Black art, and Black pain are widely circulated by non-Black people, Dean takes agency over her image and its distribution. Rice is braided into Black hair in Inyang Essien’s Our Rice series, revealing the millennia-long relationship that African people had with the grain, long before their uncredited physical and intellectual labour was exploited into a lucrative plantation crop. Our Rice returns African expertise to a narrative that would reduce African people to “slaves.”
Place informs identity. So, how do racialized people relate to place, land, and nature after a legacy of trafficking, forced labour, and displacement? Jeff Thomas’ Bear Portraits, an ongoing series, asserts the enduring presence of the self-described “Urban Iroquois” behind the lens, with his maturing son in front. Countering colonial prescriptions for where they belong, the two define and locate their own Indigeneity. Standing in a patch of urban landscaping, in her self-portrait In Search of a Certain Eden, Chanell Stone explores the connection between the Black body and nature, counter to dominant ideas that racialized people’s relationship to nature is limited to labour. In Andil Gosine’s Cane Portraits, the descendants of indentured and enslaved workers hold poses against a backdrop of sugar cane stalks. No longer constrained by the plantation, the sharply dressed participants sit for portraits at their leisure.
Two works playfully gesture toward rewriting/righting the course of colonial history. Drawing from his familial involvement in a historical British scheme to retain imperial control through pineapple farms in Kenya, David Blandy conceived Gathering Storm, a speculative world-building game where players collaborate to imagine a post-colonial sci-fi world. Daniela Ortiz revisits European colonial events to write in unsung heroes. In the story-board style The Rebellion of the Roots, anti-colonial plants epically rise up and assist racialized people in achieving justice. The series shown here has been created specifically for the local and Canadian context, taking inspiration from regional events and plants.
The temporal distance between early European colonialism’s constellations and our modern, globalized lives may, for some, dull their visibility. Regardless, we all exist under them. Like our experiences of geography and land, the institutions we encounter in our day-to-day lives, and our perceptions of racial identity and belonging, our experience of these constellations depends on our location. However, these configurations become more perceptible through the light shone on histories of place, racial identity, and labour. It is human nature to name the patterns we see and, like the artists in this exhibition, unpack their meaning.
Carl Beam, David Blandy, Andrea Chung, Minerva Cuevas, Aria Dean, Inyang Essien, Andil Gosine, Deborah Jack, Dinh Q. Lê, Candice Lin, Daniela Ortiz, Chanell Stone, Hank Willis Thomas, Jeff Thomas, Bo Wang & Lu Pan, Carrie Mae Weems, Connie Zheng
Curated by Su-Ying Lee.
