Mother Tongue

This coming weekend we celebrate the launch of the exhibition Mother Tongue, a recent moving image work by Jasmine Togo-Brisby.  Togo-Brisby, who lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, is a fourth generation Australian South Sea Islander. Her work is deeply engaged in the history and impacts of South Pacific slave-trade.  In Mother Tongue Togo-Brisby negotiates a space between the remains of the slaving ship the Don Juan, which are now submerged in the Otago harbour, and its implications on generations impacted by slavery and indentured labour. She turns to the sea as an archive for these often-untold stories - a site and a resource that can be used to record and acknowledge this history.

[image: JASMINE TOGO-BRISBY still from Mother Tongue (2020) Digital video. Courtesy of the artist]