What is the medium you would use to tell the story of your life? Your identity, your history, your future, your dreams? Choose wisely, because the way you choose to tell your story tells a story in itself.

Walking into the Art Society of Trinidad & Tobago gallery to observe the choices Dr Gabrielle Hosein, senior lecturer at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at The UWI St Augustine campus, has made with her inaugural exhibition “The Botanical Afterlife of Indenture: Imaginative Archives”, one is struck first by how medium has helped craft the narrative she is hoping to tell.

The first piece in view is a collection of familiar plants—stacks of dhal, bundles of tiny moringa leaves, neem, rice, an abundance of nourishment stacked upon tables in an installation imagined by exhibit curator and designer Melanie Archer. They are all from a list detailed by the late historian Emeritus Professor Brinsley Samaroo as the contents of the “jahaji bandal” that would be brought by labourers on their way to the Caribbean. Organic, nostalgic, it makes one think the motif of the exhibition might be a meditation on the history of Indian contributions to Caribbean culture. But one would be wrong.

The exhibition, which ran from June 10 to June 21, uses medium as a deft extension of story. So the first medium is the plants themselves, then through the room, one sees a series of arresting photographs by exhibit co-creator Abigail Hadeed. There are close-ups of flora, some of Hosein herself alongside her daughter Ziya. There is a single bangle, a bajuband, engraved with images of those same plants and the people that brought them; a collection of tattoos, and a sprawling design of colourful rangoli.

And yes, there are some archival images of Indian labourers from times gone by provided by the West Indiana and Special Collections Division, the Alma Jordan Library. But ultimately, the exhibition tells a contemporary story. In many ways, it is both a collective Caribbean story, but also one deeply personal to Hosein. The choice to become a part of the visual narrative is striking in itself:

“The story became so personal that it didn't make sense to bring in others,” she says, “to tell a story that I understood—the emotions, and the gestures, and the postures, the intimacy, the politics.

“So many of the ideas here are specific to my own feminist politics, and to my own wanting to establish what it means to be an Indo-Caribbean feminist— or to create a post-indenture feminist aesthetic praxis,” says Hosein.

But despite the personal nature of the work, it is also an intensely collaborative project, spanning across multiple media and more than a dozen collaborators. Some of the most arresting images are of detailed mehndi artwork by Risa Raghunanan-Mohammed. Again, a deeply familiar Indian folk tradition, but employed here in an entirely new fashion. Instead of abstract designs, the mehndi traces the botanical and human stories that Hosein means to tell. It is not simply a love letter to the past, but a reconceptualising of how the past can tell the story of the now.

“It was so important for me to pull from the periphery of the archive,” says Hosein. “It's here as citation, but not as a time or a place.... It's here as a mnemonic device. What stories would have been told, what photographs, what visual archive would have been created, what thoughts would have been, had the camera been in labouring women's hands.”

Hosein credits The UWI Campus Research and Publication Fund with allowing her to take the first step when she began conceptualising this project in 2023, to begin working with artists and producing what would become the final pieces of work.

“It really speaks to the value of the Campus Research and Publication Fund that it gave this exhibit the support that it did,” she says. “It allows us to show that if we trust our academics and the knowledge they have been cultivating, and trust their desire to work in an interdisciplinary manner to bring that knowledge to the public, it can not only educate but inspire the imagination of the public—to not only look back at the past differently, but to spark their own stories.”

The exhibit was additionally sponsored by First Citizens, the Central Bank of Trinidad and Tobago, Beacon Insurance, the High Commission of India, V&S Pharmaceuticals, Rent-A-Amp Sound and Lighting Company, Chatak Food Products Ltd and Little Store Ltd.