Botanical Afterlife of Indenture ^{CEFR B1}

The exhibition "The Botanical Afterlife of Indenture: Imaginative Archives" was a collaboration between Gabrielle Hosein, a senior lecturer at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, and photographer Abigail Hadeed. It opened at the Art Society of Trinidad and Tobago in Port of Spain from June 10 to 21 and was completed after two years of work, near the 180th anniversary of Indian Arrival on May 30.

The project began with an archival photograph from the Michael Goldberg West India collection showing an Indian woman in a dhoti on a Jamaican coconut plantation. Hosein said the image challenged common ideas about how indentured women dressed and it inspired contemporary photographs and new visual archives. The exhibition aimed to pick out images history has often forgotten.

Hadeed focused on botanicals people brought in jahajin bandals, drawing on research by Professor Emeritus Brinsley Samaroo. The plants became motifs to show continuity; Hadeed used movement, blurred visuals and still objects to suggest memory and the passage of time. The work questions stereotypes about Indo‑Caribbean women and included collaborators such as a mehndi artist, a tattoo designer, a jeweller and a curator. The show featured film and mixed media.