'Indigo Waves and Other Stories' traces links between the continents Asia & Africa

Time has been a testament to shifting geographies, the epistemology of map making and renavigation. While we question, navigate and remap the notions of defined cartographies, we seldom come across revelations—non-fictional as well as imaginary—ones that somehow missed being mentioned in books of histories and theories thereafter. However, what continues is a navigational journey of probing those missing pieces that can actually remap preconceived notions and challenge existing ideas. In an endeavour to re-navigate links between Asia and Africa, curators Natasha Ginwala and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung presented a multi-chapter exhibition at Gropius Bau and SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin; the two-space show re-navigated the indigo trade routes, the Afrasian Sea through the lens of artists, filmmakers, musicians, writers, and researchers.

Before delving deeper into the epicentres of the Afrasian histories, I wonder why this art exhibition set ground on Berlin and not one of the diasporic lands of the Indigo Waves. Curators share, “As a pluriversal city, Berlin must afford itself the luxury of encountering its multiple histories, which are reverberations of narratives told and lived across the Indian Ocean, and stories that, from the land-locked space of Berlin, through the African and Asian diasporic communities, also echo on, in and through the Afrasian Sea.”

Walking room after room into this documentary, it almost felt like flipping pages of the books of history into the ties of the Indigo Waves. While moving between the two venues the exhibition energy almost invited the viewers in experiencing the fluid associations that opened up like the tug and swell of tides. It attempted to highlight the forced and unforced movements that occurred through currents of coastal societies, water-borne kinship, and mercantile imperialism. The show endorsed what Francoise Verges calls "the politics of forgetfulness," rather than recentering the colonial gaze. The curator duo commented, “At the outset, there is amnesia and divergence even with the naming of the ocean, different coastlines and islands have their own way of calling the water. There is rampant anti-blackness, xenophobia, and Islamophobia in many parts of the Indian Ocean World that have led to forgetting the legacies of pre-imperial navigators, travellers, treatises of acculturation, and the ocean as a vital contact zone written and preserved in ledgers, handbooks, mythologies, and folk stories.”

However, in the process of recentering the colonial gaze, it is crucial to first trace the oceanic realities in its truest sense. Contemporary artists respond and unlock colonial and precolonial histories from the depth of the seas. Euridice Zaituna Kala’s sound and sculptural installation retraced the routes of the slave ship and summoned the memory of the waters. Shiraz Bayjoo’s talismans carried the weight of mourning and survival, recollecting foremothers and their struggles in the Indian Ocean World, particularly from the Mauritius shorelines. Textile flags bearing portraits of early Dutch such as the Malagasy queens, drew lines of enquiry between land erasure and matriarchy within plantation landscapes. Rossella Biscotti’s rubber works committed to narrating forgotten histories in the South East Asian rubber plantation societies.

Textile has also been an important marker in studying as well as preserving history such as Jennifer Tee’s contemporary take on ceremonial textiles as well as ship cloths used during Second World War. Hued in natural pigments, miniaturised paintings in Kalamkari and cyanotype (mimicking the colour indigo) style, Lavanya Mani’s textile paintings unravelled the violence of colonial extraction, extortion of riches, enslaved labour and much more. Similar to Mani’s animal fables, Thania Petersen and Adama Delphine Fawundu depicted the sea deities, djinns and hydro-imaginaries that inhabit the tidalectic depths. Fawundu narrated familial stories from her Mende ancestors, as she drew from her grandmother’s textiles and used new patterns printed as cyanotypes and UV-activated inks.

Departing from the darkness of the colonial oceanic tides, the exhibition strived to redefine the notion of ‘re-navigation’. In an attempt to re-navigate, the show brought to light new imaginative cartographies. In a conversation with STIR, Natasha Ginwala introduced three revelations on this very idea of re-navigation—centralisation of water rather than land; the diversion, the deflection, and the refraction of emphasis on the Atlantic Ocean; and to remap. “To renavigate is to create pluriversal relations and rekindle structures of affinity rather than animosities planted by the imperial imaginary,” she added.

Reflecting on the problematics of cartography and the finiteness of a map, Malala Andrialavidrazana presented a series of photomontages. Titled Figures, the body of works read like an exhumation and recomposition of pictorial, symbolic, and representational legacies. Shubigi Rao’s contribution was the film The Pelagic Tracts (2018), an immersive account mapping the trade routes of book smugglers. It highlighted the loss, the indecipherable, migrancy, and the cross-cultural experience. Nikhil Chopra’s twelve-hour performance and a room-scaled installation titled One Water, Many Lands (2023) evoked the contours of water cycles that interlink the Indian Ocean with the lands it unfurls against. His performance represented the sea and the interconnectedness of its ecologies and fluctuating cycles.

As I highlight some anchor points from the show, the exhibition certainly left me with multiple thought-provoking tangents. From looking at the colonial past to remapping the future, the curation had strong poignant visual voices that stand true and imperative in this contemporary era. The curators left the show on one broad question: What does oceanic “re-memory” look like to you?