Exhibition: Liquid Archive
17 June – 6 September 2026
We warmly invite you to 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.
PROGRAM
16 June 2026 ⬝ 18:00–19:30
Book Talk
Indenture, Blackbirding, Women’s Cultures of
Resistance
with Margaret Mishra, Kirsten McGavin,
Jasmine Togo-Brisby and Pia Wiegmink
Global Heritage Lab
16 June 2026 ⬝ 20:00–21:30
Exhibition opening
Liquid Archive
by Jasmine Togo-Brisby
Global Heritage Lab
21 June 2026 ⬝ 15:00–17:00
Workshop Crafting A Life – Spring by Cheryl McIntosh
in collaboration with Theodor Wonja Michael Library
Global Heritage Lab
12 July 2026 ⬝15:00–17:00
Workshop Crafting A Life – Summer by Cheryl McIntosh
in collaboration with Theodor Wonja Michael Library
Global Heritage Lab
16 July 2026 ⬝ 15:00–17:00
GHL Seminar Series
hydroLOVEgy: remembering with water
a seminar on rivers, memory and
(hydro-)relational curating
with Nada Schroer and Tanya Gautam
Meeting point: Biergarten Schänzchen,
Rosental 105, 53111 Bonn
4 September 2026 ⬝ 14:00–16:00
Interactive Tour
Bodies of Water – Readings and Reflections on
Liquid Archives with Julia Binter
Global Heritage Lab