Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Guest Editor: Manisha Anjali
Issue 41: LovePublished April 2020
This work is dedicated to my Aaji and Fua, the two women who blessed me with craft and their love. I will always honour your labour and uphold our practices of craft.
Quishile/Shila/Sheela: To uphold my Aaji’s craft as a namesakeQuishile Charan, 2020Video by Matavai TaulangauVideo, 16 mins 51secs
Quishile Charan is an Indo-Fijian artist and writer living and working in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Charan’s practice focuses on healing through craft that speaks of hands, emotions, spirituality, and of women who resisted indentured labour during colonial Fiji. As a female descendent of Girmit (indentured labour), Charan undertakes her responsibility to build counter-colonial narratives for her female ancestors. Charan’s practice looks at the multifarious forms of female resistance against colonialism and patriarchy that is threaded throughout Fiji’s history. These histories have become forgotten or lost under state-sanctioned colonial narratives of indentured labour in Fiji (1879–1920).
She explores how textile narratives can stitch and thread together active forms of love, care and hope that function as a contemporary form of resistance to the present-day realities of existing under neocolonialism. Charan also seeks to use textile-making to challenge the colonial occupation of knowledge that pertains to the history of women’s bodily and mental experience of indentured labour in Fiji.
Craft is used to keep these important histories active and within the present for her community. Charan upholds the values and significance of craft as a language, identity and hope through the intergenerational love shared between the artist and the women in her life. 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.