Featured image: Quishile Charan – dyed fabric india 2017
YOUR WOMAN IS A VERY BAD WOMAN is the confronting title of a new exhibition by Quishile Charan at firstdraft gallery. The title is taken from the seminal paper ‘Your Woman is a Very Bad Woman’: Revisiting Female Deviance in Colonial Fiji’ by Margaret Mishra.
For the exhibition Charan has developed a textile narrative in conversation with female elders in Fiji as a site of healing for descendants through traditional knowledge systems.
Quishile Charan is an emerging artist living and working in Aotearoa, New Zealand of Indo-Fijian heritage. Charan uses traditional modes of textile making to reflect upon the landscape of Indentured Labour and the on-going neo-colonial affects on the Indo-Fijian community. Wood-carved flora and fauna stamped onto naturally dyed cotton cloth serves as a tool to re-write and restore ownership of Indo-Fijian history. Through grassroots methodology, knowledge is kept and stored with each length of fabric created, both a form of visually-expressed oral storytelling and an offering to the girmitiyas, the ancestors of Indenture.
The exhibition YOUR WOMAN IS A VERY BAD WOMAN is now open at firstdraft gallery [Facebook] until 27/4/18
