Twelve Gates Arts is proud to present Remnants of Another, a group exhibition curated by Suzanne Persard. Featuring works from Nazrina Rodjan, Sarah Rohani Drepaul, Nicholas D’Ornellas, and Vanessa Godden to open on Friday May 5th, 2023. 

Opening Reception: May 5th, 2023, 5-8pm

Remnants of Another traces the contours of genealogical memory among Indo-Caribbean artists descended from indentured Indian laborers to Suriname, Trinidad, and Guyana (1838-1917) working in the Netherlands, Canada and the U.S. Juxtaposing historical and family archives, these artists visualize remembrance as a form of survival alongside the enduring inheritance of Indian indentureship. Featuring practices ranging from oil painting to film, quilting and printmaking to photography, this exhibit reimagines alternative visions of ancestral selves, kinship and diaspora.

Remnants of Another features works from Nazrina Rodjan, Sarah Rohani Drepaul, Nicholas D’Ornellas, and Vanessa Godden. It is on view from May 5, 2023 to June 24, 2023 at Twelve Gates Arts, 106 North 2nd St. Philadelphia, PA 19106. Gallery Hours: Thursday-Saturday 11 AM - 6 PM or by appointment.

NAZRINA RODJAN

Nazrina Rodjan is a Dutch-Surinamese visual artist of Hindustani (indentured Indian) descent. Rodjan was born and raised in Rotterdam and holds a bachelor's degree (2016) from St. Joost School of Art and Design. Rodjan primarily works in graphite and oil. Her work represents themes of migration, queerness and diaspora, and a significant body of her work has focused on portraiture: portraits of people of color, ancestral photographs and colonial postcards. She is committed to visually representing marginalized and invisible stories. Her latest project ‘Kala Pani: 1873-2023’ is a series of oil paintings commemorating the lives of indentured Indian women who appeared on photographs, staged as objects for the colonial gaze. She draws inspiration from genre pieces by Dutch masters like Vermeer who used time-consuming techniques and expensive pigments like ultramarine to paint the women in his works. By using a similar palette and a medium traditionally used to create portraits of European nobility, she pays homage to the lives of these women from the South Asian diaspora whom history has merely footnoted. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including shows in Amsterdam; New York; Cologne and London. 

SARAH ROHANI DREPAUL

Sarah Rohani Drepaul merges poetry and filmmaking to rethink sexuality, spirituality, and how memory resides in the body. Her provocative and visceral style intends to challenge shame, subvert gender and evoke mysticism in the mundane. Through her multidisciplinary practice,  Sarah works to build trust with the images in our sublime as sacred and accessible knowledge, often interrogating and queering the notions behind archival as the truth. She creates new knowledge about the simultaneous resistance to and persistence of memories at the site of the body.  She is driven by the healing capabilities of art — and how vulnerability is essential for our collective liberation. They hold a dual BA in Film Production and English Literature from Drexel University and a documentary directing certification from Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV in Havana, Cuba. Her work has been shown at the King Manor Museum (NYC), Queer Women of Color Film Festival (San Francisco, CA), Chaya’s Chatpati Mela (Queens, NY), and more. She is currently a writer in residence at VelvetPark Media in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and a freelance film producer and intimacy coordinator based in Queens, New York.

NICHOLAS D’ORNELLAS

Nicholas D’Ornellas is a Guyanese-born printmaker and weaver living in Jersey City, NJ. He holds a BFA (2021) from The Cooper Union for The Advancement of Science and Art. His focuses include printmaking as a vehicle into life-size handwoven screen-printed textiles that explore subject matters of domestic immigrant narratives. Nick’s work pays homage to his ongoing interest in the functionality of craft and also his family’s flight from racial and classist violence in Guyana. He physically threads together the layered emotions that come with being within a deeply consuming family structure. Nick’s hand weaving can be understood as both rehearsal and transformation of memory.

VANESSA GODDEN

Vanessa Godden is a queer Indo-Caribbean and Euro-Canadian artist, educator, and curator. They are based in Pickering, the traditional territory of the Mississauga’s of Scugog Island First Nations, the Anishinaabe, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples. Godden’s transdisciplinary practice explores how personal histories and the body in relation to geographic space can be conveyed through oral and somatic storytelling in art. They draw from their multi-ethnic diasporic experiences navigating the world to build multi-sensory performances, videos, sound installations, book art pieces, and net-art that unfurl the impacts of trauma on the body, connections to community, and tethers to culture. Godden is a sessional lecturer at universities across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. They are also the co-founder of the curatorial collective Diasporic Futurisms. They hold a PhD from the Victorian College of the Arts (Melbourne, Australia; 2020), MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, USA; 2014), and BFA from the University of Houston (Houston, USA; 2012). Their work has been exhibited in group and solo exhibitions at organisations such as Articule in Montreal, The Fiona and Sidney Myer Gallery (formerly known as Margaret Lawrence Gallery) in Melbourne, Youkobo Artspace in Tokyo, ClampArt in New York City, and Aurora Picture Show in Houston.

SUZANNE PERSARD

Suzanne Persard is Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of South Florida. She was born and raised in Bronx, New York to parents from Kingston, Jamaica. As an interdisciplinary scholar with expertise on Indian indentureship to the Caribbean and its diasporas, her research, teaching and curatorial practice engage with the subversive genealogies of queer and feminist archives. Suzanne was profiled by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center for her work as an activist and founding member of Jahajee Sisters, the first non-profit in the U.S. committed to ending gender-based violence within Indo-Caribbean communities. She is the creator and curator of the interdisciplinary project, Queer x Indenture, a transnational series featuring queer scholars; visual artists; performers; and archivists throughout the indentured diaspora. She is also the creator of two Digital Humanities projects (Digital Diasporas and its corresponding Omeka open-access digital collection) featuring visual storytelling, oral histories and ephemera from descendants of the indentured Indian diaspora in Jamaica; Suriname; the Netherlands; Trinidad and Tobago; South Africa; Fiji; and Australia. Suzanne also advised the archival acquisitions of the Indo-Caribbean Collection, which is the first collection of its kind in the United States, at the University of Pennsylvania.

Please join us for an opening reception on Friday, May 5th from 5-8pm.