Global art non-profit KADIST and ILHAM Gallery in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, are presenting the group show The Plantation Plot from April 20 - September 21, 2025. The exhibition features artists from communities who were most impacted by large-scale colonial-era plantations from the 17th to the 20th century, owned by European settlers. The artists and collectives featured span Asia, Australia, South America and the Caribbean, a reflection of how far-reaching the history and impact of plantations has been. The exhibition’s theme was inspired by the work of the Jamaican critic Sylvia Wynter, who describes the large-scale human migration, slave labour and ecological destruction required to create monocrop plantations and imperial wealth.

The exhibition is curated by Lim Sheau Yun, a Malaysian curator selected by ILHAM and KADIST as part of an initiative to support emerging curators and strengthen Malaysia’s ties with the global art scene. Speaking with STIR, Sheau Yun described the significance of the plantation setting, “The plantation is both a historical formation and a contemporary condition…Its political legacy lives on in class structures, in migration flows and in how postcolonial states manage land, people and race. The plantation, in this sense, is not a relic. It is a ghost structure that continues to shape how we live, labour and relate to land.”

This ‘ghost structure’ is evident in Chinese-American multimedia artist Connie Zheng’s work As It Is: Nothing Lasts Forever (2025). Commissioned for this exhibition, the artwork uses collage and layering to trace the transmutation of natural materials (like tea, rubber and minerals) into commodities, driving the twin engines of colonialism and extractive capitalism. Reimagined imperial currency notes and cartographic lines tracing resources and labour over land and time are contrasted with the artwork’s background—a composite cyanotype depicting 13th century Chinese star maps and shadows of plants from Zheng’s mother’s garden. Through this juxtaposition, Zheng foregrounds the impermanence and ephemerality of capitalist expansion and its financial machinery while simultaneously tracing its history.

The Plantation Plot moves fluidly between analysis of the plantation system and closer, more personal windows into the lives of labourers. Indo-Caribbean artist Kelly Sinnapah Mary’s acrylic on tapestry work, Notebook 10, l‘enfance de sanbras (The Childhood of Sanbras) (2021), for example, is part of a series focused on the artist’s heritage as a descendant of Indian labourers sent to work on French-owned plantations in Guadeloupe, an overseas region of France, in the 19th century. This weighty history is seen through the eyes of a little girl—Sanbras—encountering the memories, culture and community of the artist and her ancestors. In a similar vein, And words were whispered (2019) by Sancintya Mohini Simpson depicts the lived experiences of Indian women working on tea and sugarcane plantations in late 19th century South Africa using watercolour and gouache on handmade wasli paper. The series highlights the inner lives of these women by depicting moments of quiet and community. The vast negative space surrounding the small figures depicts the plantation setting through its absence. Simpson is thus able to restructure the historical narrative of colonialism, foregrounding the lives and subjecthood of labourers while the plantation, its owners and their violence are relegated to the background.

The Women (1950s), an oil painting by Malaysian modern artist Yong Mun Sen, differs from these works aesthetically despite being united in theme. The golden-hued painting shows two female labourers, set against vast fields stretching into the horizon; it draws its influence from the Western canon—particularly post-Impressionist paintings by artists like Vincent van Gogh. Although this might seem like a counterintuitive choice for an ostensibly anti-colonial artwork, unlike many pastoral Western paintings, which are often divorced from the reality of hard manual labour, Mun Sen’s work is based on his experience as a farmer during the Japanese occupation of Malaysia during the Second World War. Additionally, the post-Impressionists were themselves influenced by Japanese art. Similarly, the artworks from the series Belle Époque of the Tropics (2021), by the Brazilian artist Noara Quintana, create a suspended sitting room from lamps and tapestries made using latex (a product of Amazonian rubber plantations), silk organza, acrylic paint, cotton, graphite, resin, metal and LED light. She blends the Art Nouveau aesthetic of European colonists (which lives on in Brazil's architecture) with fabric art made of valuable indigenous materials like rubber and silk. The whole installation is submerged in glowing green light that reinforces the Frankenstein-like collision of aesthetics—a critique of colonial attempts to turn cities bordering the Amazon basin into the ‘Paris of the Tropics’.

This polyphony of aesthetics and references was instrumental to the exhibition design. According to Sheau Yun, “The exhibition resists flattening these experiences into a single narrative by emphasising difference, not just in geography or history, but also in form and aesthetic strategy…The plantation, as a global structure, generates sameness, of crops, of labour regimes, of violence, but we must not read it as a flattened regime. The plantation's afterlives have been culturally and politically divergent.” These afterlives are explored in greater detail by the digital art in the exhibition—American artist Diane Severin Nguyen, for example, photographs sculptures of natural and manmade found objects, defamiliarising them by working at extremely close range. If Revolution is a Sickness (2020) uses a glove and plant matter to capture an abstract moment that depicts something in a state of metamorphosis, growth or decay. Her work draws attention to the intervention of the camera in this vulnerable moment, interrogating the role of technology, journalism and photography in trajectories of colonial violence.

Thai artist Pratchaya Phinthong’s video art piece, Today will take care of tomorrow (2022), also employs the camera to tell a story of resilience and adaptation in the most bombed nation on Earth—Laos. Around 30 per cent of the cluster bombs dropped in Laos by the United States during the Second Indochina War remain on the ground, waiting. Phinthong layers the history of the area over the contemporary footage by using an infra-red lens to film trees surrounding the ruins of a Buddhist temple, still embedded with shrapnel from this period. The trees have grown with and around the metal, which now prevents illegal loggers from decimating these forests by jamming their blades. Like the title of the work, Phinthong moves beyond history into highlighting the unlikely systems of protection developed by local communities and ecosystems from a legacy of violence.

The Plantation Plot does not tell one story and questions accepted narratives about plantations and the economy they drove. It uses this historical construct to interrogate modern power structures, revealing how contemporary relationships between nature, technology and labour came to be.

‘The Plantation Plot’ will be displayed at ILHAM Gallery in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, from ​​April 20 – September 21, 2025.