Dear Mrs Wunderlich

Jasmine Togo-Brisby

Page Galleries, Wellington
23 July – 15 August 2020

Reviewed by Sinead Overbye for PhotoForum, 28 August 2020

The ancestor greets me as I enter the room. She faces the door, a silhouette against an ornate Wunderlich ceiling. Illuminated, she is shadow woman. She does not speak, but rather asks to be read, and so I try to read her.

It is hard to read a face without any features. It is hard to read a history that has stayed in the mouths of people who are gone now. People who have had their voices taken. The ancestor’s image reminds us of all this. The pain of not knowing, of not having histories represented. The pain of forced silence. But at the same time, the ancestor’s presence, her physicality, is undeniable. She is so intensely there, even if we can’t see the details of her face.

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Togo-Brisby’s work has for a long time grappled with her identity as a South Sea Islander, and what that means in terms of history and representation. Much of her recent artwork has made reference to discoveries of documents confirming that her own great-great-grandmother was stolen from Vanuatu and taken to Australia to become a slave for the Wunderlich family in the late 19th Century. The exhibition is addressed to the head of that house, Mrs Wunderlich. Throughout the works, the images of Wunderlich ceilings recur again and again, juxtaposed with the silhouettes of these South Sea Islander women. The slave and the master are bound together in history.

To have such a devastating, and relatively recent, family history, is traumatic. We are owned by our heritage. The things our ancestors have done, and what has been done to them. Togo-Brisby’s work is courageous. It takes courage to tell your story. In a neo-colonial context, it is an act of determined resistance.

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Togo-Brisby has been piecing her family history together, in a society that doesn’t like to acknowledge the ongoing traumas of colonisation. It wasn’t always difficult to remember histories. It once was in the blood, in the way families reared their children, in the songs sang to them, in the shape of the land and its waters. It was when the ships came that things shifted. Indigenous peoples stopped being able to transmit traditional knowledge. Their stories became defined by violence.

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Before photography, silhouette portraiture was an effective and relatively affordable means of visual self-representation. The silhouette suggests key details of a person’s features, and can therefore provide a fairly reliable suggestion of what they look like. It also draws attention to the moment the work was created. The subject of the silhouette would have, at some point, had to be sitting in the same room as the silhouette artist, for the duration of time it took the artist to complete their work.

The subjects – Togo-Brisby’s mother, daughter, herself – once stood in the presence of projections of Wunderlich ceilings, before the camera. Their bodies interact with these images in space. The photographs survive as proof of these moments.

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Fact: the ancestor was stolen

Fact: the ancestor was owned by the Wunderlich family

Fact: her descendants still feel this, reverberating through their lives

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The dresses of the figures, as well as their posture and poise, hark back to colonisation, to a culture introduced and imposed. The figures are constrained and repressed by the clothes that they wear. They pose in a way that conforms with the manner in which aristocrats have been posing for portraits, even long before photography’s invention.

The Wunderlich ceiling tiles provide the backdrop in which these women exist. Their bodies and their stories have been defined by the circumstances imposed upon them. And yet, they are sturdy, dignified. These women take up space. They demand that we pay attention.

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Togo-Brisby, her mother, and her daughter are inheritors of the pain their ancestor endured. They wear ships on their heads as a reminder. Their silhouettes include the ship, it seems a part of them. Observing them for the first time, I can’t help but flinch at the fact that these ships are sitting on the most tapu part of their bodies. Although their posture is stately and dignified, I want to reach in and tear the ships out of their hair. They do not belong there. No matter how well we can balance them, we are not meant to carry these weights.

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Photographic portraiture is inherently disturbing. It’s tied up with ethnography, science and exploitation that has historically enabled the categorisation of indigenous peoples, in order to dehumanise and other them. Photography was, in many ways, a colonial weapon.

The ships, balanced carefully, remind us that the coloniser’s did not just take people and their land. They also took photographs of indigenous ancestors, to ship off to museums as artefacts. They also, sometimes, took their heads.

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We look directly up at the ceiling, and simultaneously look sidewards at the womens’ profiles. Here, photography is achieving something the human eye cannot – to look at the world from two different perspectives at once. These works are a peculiar form of travel, between histories, between cultures. They upset and disturb time.

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Dear Mrs Wunderlich is quietly powerful. It lingers in the mind. It gives the observer a lot to think about, and asks us where we position ourselves in observing. Are we seeing a history we are complicit in? Or are we looking on with some connection to the feeling of colonial loss? The South Sea Islander history is different from Māori history, and yet there are still the ships. Despite having experienced different traumas, these vessels still unite us, in the way they disturbed and defined our lives.

Another thing I’m left wondering is whether these photographs, tied up with Togo-Brisby’s family history, are actually historical. Or are they, indeed, contemporary images of what the world is like now, and of struggles some are constantly having to deal with, no matter how much time goes by? Although Mrs Wunderlich is dead now, Togo-Brisby still has things to say to her.

My favourite piece is the image of the women holding a crow in her hand, observing it. Nothing on her head. There is freedom in this image. Opportunity. A sense of being able to move forward. And there is also a sense of Togo-Brisby asserting ownership – of her ancestry, identity, and a history that is often not told.

Sinead Overbye (Ngāti Porou, Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki, Rongowhakaata) is a poet and fiction writer living in Wellington. In 2018 she completed her MA in creative writing at the IIML. She is a founder and co-editor of Stasis Journal. Her work can be found in The Pantograph Punch, Tupuranga Journal, Turbine | Kapohau, Starling, and other places.

This review was made possible by funding from Creative New Zealand.