Jasmine Togo-Brisby, Until We Runneth Over, 2024. Installation view, It Is Not a Place, Institute of Modern Art, 2024. Photo: Joe Ruckli. Courtesy: the artist and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane.

Jasmine Togo-Brisby is an Australian South Sea Islander artist whose work examines the Pacific slave trade and its impact on those who trace their roots to Australia through its practices.

Togo-Brisby conjures with an iconography of tall ships, decorative ceilings, and crow feathers. Her ships remind us of the dangerous vessels that transported tens of thousands of Pacific Islanders to Australia, while her crow feathers refer to ‘blackbirding’, the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century practice of deceiving, coercing, or kidnapping Islanders into servitude.

As children, her great-great-grandparents were taken from Vanuatu to Sydney, working as domestic servants for the well-known Wunderlich family. Her decorative ceilings recall the popular pressed-tin ceilings made by the family, which can be found in buildings across Australia.

It Is Not a Place features two major new works—a sculpture and a video. In the sculpture, crow feathers cascade from a decorative ceiling rosette, reminding us that Australian ‘civil’ society was built on violence. In the video—a haunting computer animation—a ship, made of crow wings, sails on a churning ocean crafted from crow feathers.

The exhibition’s title complicates matters. It is a negative response to a question it assumes we have asked, or an assumption we have made. It makes us wonder to what extent her work speaks to an actual place—a demarcated location in time and space—or something else.

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