Lifepatch with Kawan Pustaha, Our Knowledge, 2024. Courtesy the artists.

Weaving the Aksara into Knowledge
Lifepatch with Kawan Pustaha

July 16 – September 2, 2024
Curated by Su-Ying Lee

Cycle 3 of Overseeding: Botany, Cultural Knowledge, and Attribution, a three-part lightbox exhibition on UTM campus

Weaving the Aksara into Knowledge is a collaborative photographic series by Indonesian artist-researcher collectives Lifepatch and Kawan Pustaha (Friends of Pustaha), who overseed the colonial imperative to seize objects and, instead, reroot their communities by directing flows of knowledge.

Over several years, the collectives have been researching pustaha manuscripts—illuminated, handwritten, embellished books authored by the Indigenous Batak men and women who are Datu, spiritual leaders in North Sumatra. The hard, carved covers contain accordion style pages, made of soft bark, that deal with social structure, religion, esoteric symbols, medicine, and other topics passed down through generations. Since the earliest days of European exploration and colonization, practices of biopiracy have involved appropriating ethnobotanical knowledge from Indigenous tropical peoples. This process has brought food, decorative and medicinal plants, as well as profit to the West. During the Dutch colonial period in Indonesia (1816–1941), thousands of books were taken out of the region, despite colonizers being illiterate of the Batak aksara or script. For those seeking to extract information and profit, these acts of cultural erosion, alienating people from generations of their literary works, journals, and records, have failed to profitably uncover the meaning of and applications for pustaha texts.

The collectives seek to bring about rematriation. For them, rematriation prioritizes the reclamation and return of knowledge, rather than physical objects. Through working with philologists and museums in Europe, the collectives channel knowledge back into their communities where rematriation continues through “doing the knowledge.” Led by Kawan Pustaha, Indigenous Batak practices are brought into the day-to-day, accessed and communicated through traditional aksara. This takes shapes through formal and informal ways of being with the script, including writing sessions and using recipes for food and healing practices. They take direction from Batak elders who have expressed that, although the pustaha are overseas, spirit cannot be taken and knowledge remains with the Batak.

Against the deadening effect of museums, isolating culture in the past, Weaving the Aksara into Knowledge sets the subjects in the present, using colour photography to refer to the transcendence and survival of cultural wisdom and pustaha. Counter to how museums rarefy knowledge, the artists present us with an image of pustaha making tools, demonstrating fearlessness, generosity, and confidence in the rematriation that has been set in motion.

For the full curatorial statement, visit the Blackwood website.

Lifepatch with Kawan Pustaha, Power of Sibaso, 2024. Courtesy the artists.

About Overseeding: Botany, Cultural Knowledge, and Attribution

Artists: Inyang Essien, patricia kaersenhout, Lifepatch with Kawan Pustaha
Curator: Su-Ying Lee

Overseeding uncovers contributions that racialized people have made to botanical knowledge, previously obscured by European colonialism. Overseeding is the practice of spreading grass seed for the recolonization of lawns, land that would have had its own botanical communities. Turning the settler practice back on itself, the exhibition seeds over monocultural understandings of the origins of agricultural, botanical, and herbal knowledge, returning pre-imperial ideas and diverse authors to the space.

Cycle 1: May 1 – June 3, 2024

Inyang Essien’s Our Rice visualizes the strategy that African women developed for braiding rice, seeds, and grains into their hair, preparing for being trafficked by the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The women’s actions would preserve culture and ensure the endurance of Maroon communities. African rice would also produce a highly profitable plantation crop, influencing cuisine in the American South, without benefitting those who brought it to fruition.

Cycle 2: June 4 – July 15, 2024

patricia kaersenhout’s Of Palimpsests & Erasure lays bare at whose expense Dutch naturalist and enslaver Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) achieved success and authored her most lauded book Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium. Shading over select drawings by the naturalist, kaersenhout complicates readings of the original images with her pigments, revealing the realities that Merian’s achievements stand upon: labour and knowledge extraction of enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples.

Cycle 3: July 16 – September 2, 2024

Indonesian artist-researcher collectives Lifepatch and Kawan Pustaha are informed by their joint research into pustaha, illuminated manuscripts authored by spiritual leaders from Indigenous Batak communities in North Sumatra. Volumes of the books were taken during Dutch colonialism and are now kept in museums in Europe and elsewhere. The artists’ rematriation project resists colonial values, instead prioritizing flows of knowledge back to community.

Beyond instances of theft and injustice, Overseeding brings forth the equally compelling parallel stories of how plants and racialized communities evolved alongside one another with plants supporting the preservation of cultural foodways, acts of agency and survival of ancestral wisdom.

Courtesy of Madelyne Beckles. Photo: Clea Cristakos-Gee.

Overseeding Public Programs

A discursive program series expands on the exhibition’s themes through three workshops on decolonial food practices, colonial histories of plants, and contemporary wellness.

For Cycle 3, Madelyne Beckles will facilitate Radical Self Care on Thursday, July 25, 12-1:30pm (UTM campus, outdoors; indoors in Kaneff Centre/Innovation Complex if inclement weather). This workshop will explore how contemporary wellness is derived from the feminist and civil rights movements of the 1960s and 70s. Participants will sit in a circle and enjoy nourishing snacks, practice light movement and breathwork, engage with source materials, and create personal care plans for the pinch points in life.

RSVP required; register for free on Eventbrite.

The Blackwood gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the University of Toronto Mississauga. Proudly sponsored by U of T affinity partners. Discover the benefits of affinity products!

The Blackwood
University of Toronto Mississauga
3359 Mississauga Rd.
Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6

www.blackwoodgallery.ca
blackwood.gallery@utoronto.ca
905.828.3789
Facebook | Twitter | Instagram

Please note: Overseeding is FREE and open to the public, and accessible 24 hours a day in four outdoor lightboxes across UTM campus. Some movement throughout the campus is required—ramps and curb cuts are in place.