Language
From my mother’s
Sancintya Mohini Simpson
This space presents From My Mothers, a deeply personal and poetic installation by Australian artist Sancintya Mohini Simpson.
Simpson is a descendant of Indian women who were forcibly relocated to South Africa in the late 19th century under British colonial rule, as part of the indentured labor system. These women, labeled with the derogatory term “coolie,” endured extreme exploitation and violence—and most of their stories remain undocumented, erased by silence.
From My Mothers is an attempt to restore that silence. Drawing on memory and ritual, the artist creates her own handmade paper using mango skins and sugarcane ash—materials drawn from her mother’s garden and ancestral landscape. Upon these surfaces, she layers drawings, fragments of text, geometric patterns, and traces of a language that resists full legibility.
These paper works are not merely objects; they are sensorial surfaces that compress matrilineal knowledge, colonial displacement, and the labor of both body and land. Through repeated verses, patterns, and blurred markings, the work quietly evokes lost languages, unspoken memories, and suppressed emotions.
In this act of making, Simpson proposes a ritual gesture—an offering to those who were never named, a gesture of healing that reclaims memory before trauma, and presence before disappearance.
From My Mothers becomes a site where personal history and collective memory overlap, where the female body meets the colonial archive. It is a space and time in which voices that crossed oceans and were silenced without record are once again allowed to speak—through the language of art.
The work resonates profoundly with the theme of this Biennale, Neighbors of Civilization – somewhere over the yellow sea. Moving fluidly between civilization and non-civilization, center and periphery, memory and unmemory, Simpson shows us how art can offer resistance—not through noise, but through quiet acts of return, reclamation, and care.
Simpson is a descendant of Indian women who were forcibly relocated to South Africa in the late 19th century under British colonial rule, as part of the indentured labor system. These women, labeled with the derogatory term “coolie,” endured extreme exploitation and violence—and most of their stories remain undocumented, erased by silence.
From My Mothers is an attempt to restore that silence. Drawing on memory and ritual, the artist creates her own handmade paper using mango skins and sugarcane ash—materials drawn from her mother’s garden and ancestral landscape. Upon these surfaces, she layers drawings, fragments of text, geometric patterns, and traces of a language that resists full legibility.
These paper works are not merely objects; they are sensorial surfaces that compress matrilineal knowledge, colonial displacement, and the labor of both body and land. Through repeated verses, patterns, and blurred markings, the work quietly evokes lost languages, unspoken memories, and suppressed emotions.
In this act of making, Simpson proposes a ritual gesture—an offering to those who were never named, a gesture of healing that reclaims memory before trauma, and presence before disappearance.
From My Mothers becomes a site where personal history and collective memory overlap, where the female body meets the colonial archive. It is a space and time in which voices that crossed oceans and were silenced without record are once again allowed to speak—through the language of art.
The work resonates profoundly with the theme of this Biennale, Neighbors of Civilization – somewhere over the yellow sea. Moving fluidly between civilization and non-civilization, center and periphery, memory and unmemory, Simpson shows us how art can offer resistance—not through noise, but through quiet acts of return, reclamation, and care.