Exhibition Opening: Liquid Archive
16 June 2026
18:00 – 19:30
Book Talk: Indenture, Blackbirding and Women’s Cultures of Resistance in the Western Pacific
with Kirsten McGavin, Margaret Mishra and Jasmine Togo-Brisby
20:00 – 21:30
Exhibition Opening Liquid Archive by Jasmine Togo-Brisby
We warmly invite you to the opening of the exhibition Liquid Archive by Jasmine Togo-Brisby.
What memories does water hold? Drawing on her own family history, Jasmine Togo-Brisby’s exhibition Liquid Archive explores memory, colonial histories, and healing. Through photographs and the video work Mother Tongue (2020), she creates an immersive experience. The film shows the artist together with her mother and daughter at the wreck of the Don Juan — a ship connected to so-called “blackbirding,” the violent abduction of Pacific Islanders and their forced labour on sugar plantations in Australia. Across generations, histories persist: in the body, in the image, and in the sea as a “liquid archive” in which loss, resistance, and care are embedded. The photographs expand this narrative. Submerged in the sea, the women’s bodies become memorials to colonial violence, while also asserting resilience, survival and healing.
The exhibition is part of the research-exhibition project “Knowing Plants. Ecologies of Memory and Practice” at the Global Heritage Lab, University of Bonn.
The exhibition is supported by the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies.
We look forward to welcoming you and to the conversations the exhibition will inspire.