Event

In conversation with Dr. Gabrielle Jamela Hosein, South African artist Zenaeìca Singh discusses her 2024 large-scale installation, “Finding a sweet e(scape)” which pays homage to indentured women who deserted plantations in search of a better life. This installation takes inspiration from accounts of how indentured women, who escaped or tried to run away, would be heard and sometimes caught because of the sound of their jewellery clinking in the distance. Singh created this installation using multiple components: jewellery and marigold garlands cast in sugar glass and fabric sculptures of white cotton saris with either sugar-paste embroidery and crystallised pallus. These selected mundane objects are focused as they have come to be iconic signifiers of *Indianness and its Oriental strangeness. In re-presenting these objects in sugar, she draws attention to stereotypes of *Indian women, disrupting essentialist readings of their cultural differences. The fluidity and crystallisation of the sugar becomes symbolic of Indian women’s agency and subversions of colonial exploitation. (*specifies South African Indians)

Zenaéca Singh completed a MFA at the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Michaelis School of Fine Art in 2024, where she also received multiple awards for her BFA, Singh is an Accelerated Transformation of the Academic Programme (ATAP) Fellow. Selected exhibitions include Greatest Hits at Leeuwenhof Slave Lodge Remembrance Gallery, in collaboration with the Association of Visual Arts (2023). Recent exhibitions include Entangled (2024 - ongoing) with Guns & Rain at Oxford Rhodes House, along with MFA solo exhibition, Browning the Archive (2024) at Michaelis Galleries and All Directions (2025) at Fenix Museum.

Dr. Gabrielle Jamela Hosein is Senior Lecturer at The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. Her publications include the co-edited collections Indo-Caribbean Feminisms: Charting Crossings in Geography, Discourse, and Politics (CRGS 2012) and Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments (2016). Her blog, Diary of a Mothering Worker, has been published in a national newspaper since 2012, and includes numerous columns on Indo-Caribbean gender relations and feminisms. In June 2025, her exhibit, The Botanical Afterlife of Indenture: Imaginative Archives, was held at the Art Society at Trinidad and Tobago.