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Sancintya Mohini Simpson: Vessel / Vessel

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Image: Sancintya Mohini Simpson, Vessel / Vessel, 2022. Installation view, Oceanic Thinking, UQ Art Museum, 2022. Photo: Josef Ruckli.  

Sancintya Mohini Simpson: Vessel / Vessel 

Front Window Commission: 19 February 2022 – 17 December 2022  

Part of Oceanic Thinking: 19 February 2022 –25 June 2022 

Curator: Peta Rake

Sancintya Mohini Simpson is descendent of indentured labourers who were sent from India to work on colonial sugar plantations in the colony of Natal (now KwaZulu–Natal, South Africa). Upon the backdrop of a stormy wavescape, the commission on the front windows of UQ Art Museum pulls a phrase from her adjacent poem ‘we carry and hold these vessels.’ Here, the word ‘vessel’ is interchangeable to mean body, water, boat, and by extension, museum, as a site of the ongoing colonial project. Simpson gestures to ancestral ‘black waters’, both consumed and embodied, but also to submerged futures due to sea-level rise.