Botanical Afterlife of Indenture ^{CEFR B2}

"The Botanical Afterlife of Indenture: Imaginative Archives" is a collaborative exhibition by Gabrielle Hosein and photographer Abigail Hadeed that opened at the Art Society of Trinidad and Tobago in Port of Spain from June 10 to 21. The project, completed over two years and shown shortly after the 180th anniversary of Indian Arrival on May 30, combines historical research, archival photography and contemporary art to reframe Indo‑Caribbean histories.

The starting point was an archival image from the Michael Goldberg West India collection showing an Indian woman in a dhoti working on a Jamaican coconut plantation. Hosein has said this photograph challenged received ideas about how indentured women dressed and prompted a new visual archive that highlights images history often overlooked.

Hadeed developed a botanical language drawn from jahajin bandals, the cloth parcels people carried on journeys. Research by Professor Emeritus Brinsley Samaroo lists many of these plants — mango, guava, pomegranate, sapodilla, rice, string beans, turmeric, ginger, cumin, bitter gourd, cinnamon, mustard, black pepper, onion, ashoka, neem, cucumber and lotus — which the exhibition uses as motifs to signal continuity between past and present. Hadeed employed movement, blurred imagery and still objects to evoke memory and the passage of time.

The work also reimagined beauty practices and labour resistance, drawing on scholarship by Rhoda Reddock, Patricia Mohammed and Joy Mahabir. Collaborators included mehndi artist Risa Raghunanan‑Mohammed, tattoo designer Portia Subran, jeweller Frank Mitchum Weaver, and curator and graphic designer Melanie Archer. The pieces are historically grounded, contemporary and political, intended to humanise and move beyond gallery walls; some are designed to be carried and embodied, and the final element invites viewers to look down at the floor as a different way to encounter these legacies.