Sarojini Lewis

video , performance , internationaal , installatie , fotografie , Diaspora , Autobiografisch , Artistiek onderzoek , Archieven

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Sarojini Lewis (India/Sur/Netherlands) is a visual artist and researcher, has a background in Fine Art (MFA Fine Art Edinburgh University) with a specialization in (archival) photography, performance, video art and book arts. Her book A Shift of Identity (2025) explores her PhD in visual studies in JNU (Jawaharlal Nehru University) that examined the indentured labour archive through a feminine contemporary lens. Through her art, Sarojini Lewis explores how co-constructing narratives can open up new questions and interpretations of archival materials from the Caribbean and Indian Ocean with a deeply personal lens. Her projects reveal a preoccupation with history through embodiment: of the landscape, the city, the environment and its user. Through performative gestures her body sometimes appears as an archive where personal and collective histories converge. Recurring elements in her visual installations are photographs of poems, objects, people, sites of migration and moments that reveal forgotten situations, and function as visual traces and fragments that create narratives that lead to new perspectives.

**Waves of Ternate: Collecting ambiguous memories of a Pearl diver without a name** - Artist and researcher Sarojini Lewis adopts the view of an unnamed pearl diver from a letter about the North Moluccan Island of Ternate in Indonesia. Waves of Ternate: Collecting ambiguous memories by a Pearl Diver without a name is an artist book that contains a visual narrative, a dialogue of colour, paper and archives created by Lewis in collaboration with designer Edwin van Gelder and risographs printed by Stencilwerck. Lewis traces three generations of women in Ternate in the 19th century, reflecting on genealogy, gender and colonial memory, as she evokes family memories through the diver’s eyes. In her visual narrative she embodies missing and erased ‘local’ knowledge, she documents family objects New York, and describes ambiguous memories. Currents of unfamiliar navigations in the Indian Ocean led to emotional layered landscapes, the line drawings of Lewis’ her daughter, and her embodiment refers to pearls as hidden knowledge that shapes us. Page by page this narrative of Ternate uses various archival collections of the Rijksmuseum, University of Leiden, women divers in Uraguchi Kusukazu’s archive and a family archive with collaborator Nelson Harst in New York. Romanticized landscapes and photographs, containing a predominant male gaze are overlayered with her body. They transition with a notion in a letter: A note with ink, a pearl diver and my body collide. Mirroring my own body and searching for yours. I was missing your reflection in the mirror. Am I writing this letter for you? In a conversation with Setareh Noorani, Matt Plezier, and Stencilwerck we presented the artist book launch in the Kiosk in Rotterdam.

**Mamotica Narratives of Bitter Memories** - Mamotica Narratives of Bitter memories In collaboration with Tirzo Martha during the residency in IBB there was a focus on my own youth stories, such as a recurring nightmare. I tried out antotype printing and created a series of paintings, sculptural fabric and drawings that took shape of an installation. We continued to have many conversations in which my memories of my youth were leading. The performance 'Mamotica Narratives of bitter memories' for Landhuis Bloemhof consisted of a poetic reading and while I projected a series of photographs in the caves of different sides in Curaçao. The performance was intimate and for a small public as well as the open studios from IBB where I showed the installation and developed a text piece in Papiamento on the Mamotica that I wrote on the wall. In this I involved my reflections and poems on the Indo-Caribbean community of women, as they themselves did not want to show their own identities in the shape of video-work. The performances consisted of small ritual acts with the Mamotica in the caves, I created a suit that I made of different shades of black fabrics that resembled the skin of the Mamotica. The residency period led me to use new materials such as painting, sculpture besides the use of fabrics that formed new experiments within my practice. The thematics of the narratives consisted of my own youth memories and the photographic connections of being a mother and connecting to my own daughter through the Caribbean landscapes and plantation history. This relationship became the centre within a new series of photographs that focused on the natural landscapes and the navigation of mother and daughter bond. In Labyrinth Within duo exhibition with Razia Barsatie in West the Hague took place in 2025-2026, part of the conceptual approach of this project was exhibited in West the Hague and has formed the connection between a sculptural life-size well and the Mamotica dress. This was part of an installation in one of the main spaces of the exhibition Labyrinth Within where it corresponded to the sculpture Ogri Eye made by Razia Barsatie. With the dress and the well a new video work that we created with musician Satykam Mohkamsingh who plays North Indian classical music. In this work one can see a performance with incense that is burned in the hallways of the former embassy building. Through ritual, I reconnect with my childhood memories. Four generations of women are evoked by the objects encircling the well: four incense sticks, four cups brought from India, four cubes of bluing. The number 444 also signifies a protective force for Lewis, shielding against envy and jealousy. Installation part of the exhibition Labyrinth Within in West Den Haag from the 6th of September 2025 until January 2026

**Labyrinth Within - Buro Stedelijk 2025 - Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam** - Labyrinth Within is an ongoing collaboration between Razia Barsatie and Sarojini Lewis, exploring their shared yet distinct experiences as women of Indo-Caribbean descent. Through sound recordings, family archives, and personal reflections, they navigate the complex layers of cultural identity shaped by their different relationships to this heritage. Razia’s ‘traditional’ Hindustani upbringing in Suriname contrasted with Sarojini’s experience in the Netherlands, where cultural assimilation meant her mother’s Sarnami language was not transmitted. Their practice reflects on how migration, assimilation, and gender have shaped intergenerational memory, examining both inherited and lived traumas while navigating cultural boundaries in their current relationships. Buro Stedelijk welcomes the process out of the studio, into the project space. We occupy the space and observe what the interaction with the space could offer. We explore artistic interventions in the semi-public space. Often, exhibiting an artwork means freezing it in time. The work leaves the studio and is shown in a different setting. We defrost the artwork and let it develop in the project space. The start of this manifestation will not be a composed arrangement, but the beginning of an ongoing process. Dion, Thato, Razia and Sarojini work on and present their work as it lives, breathes and develops. Observing, shuffling, remixing, rehearsing and resting. They might add or remove along the way and experience what grows and what dies in these spaces. We collaboratively investigate the in-between space of artistic production and institutional presentation. At specific moments the artists organize moments to talk about or engage the public with their projects and process.

**Room 327 in the aftermath of Holi - Our Colonial Inheritance- exhibition World Museum 2022-2030** - The abstract colonial reality of the archives on indentured labour clashed with my emotional connection and relationship with this history through my own ancestors. Similar as the traces of Holi celebration, history remains as a touch of powder layered on the skin. Tangible memories shaped a contrast with the elusiveness of my ancestors' personal history. The collection of archival material are from several institutions National Archives of Suriname, - India as well as -Mauritius and the National Archives of London. Self-portraits on days of Holi are combined with some colonial documents I found. I investigated how colonization overtime has led to sexual exploitation and physical exhaustion, evident in some schedules of colonial representations on diseases on board the ships during the three month transportation from India to Suriname. Personally, with my body as a holder of genetics apart of this Indian migration and containing the traces of Holi colours on the surface I see a two sided message. Juxtaposing observations that Bhojpuri female migrants are always portrayed as decorative objects in the photographic representations of the colonial era (postcard images and photo studios) or victims of a system are present in my mind. In the current climate surrounding the Indo-Caribbean community, there is little authentic personal representation of identity. I photographed my own body on the day of Holi for four years in my room at Jawaharlal Nehru University of New Delhi. In the Holi self-portraits I pay attention to my own bodily positions and my identification with indentured labour. The first experience of this celebration in India reminded me that there is a physical aspect of touch involved. In a conflicted way, the body is on the one hand the reference to the working body (labouring bodies) through colonial documents, and on the other hand the tactile reminder of a celebration of Holi. A dairy of bodily traces throughout the years. A cycle of making myself vulnerable by documenting traces on my body, the intimacy of touch and the embodied experience of faded fingerprints, an emotion that can be felt through the daylight of the passed day, my facial expression and the fragility of exposing my body. Characteristic of this repeated ritual is the contrasts of the organic traces of Holi colours with the abstraction of rectangular schemes of the colonial documents. The body transforms through time duration of a photographic registration of four years.

**Reciting Footsteps - Ontwaken in Blauw - Fotomuseum 2026** - Reciting Footsteps, cyanotype on textile, 2022. Sarojini Lewis (1984) created a series of cyanotypes on former plantation grounds in Suriname. In Reciting Footsteps, she explores how she connects with these places physically and through the senses. Once sites of forced labour, they have now become part of her personal journey. She connects this work to her PhD research on visual archives of indentured labourers and to her own cultural background. In her work, Lewis interweaves the stories of Afro-Surinamese, Indo-Surinamese, and Indigenous communities, moving beyond a past marked by tensions. On the plantations, she encounters large iron objects from the colonial period, symbols of patriarchal power. The rainforest slowly reclaiming these sites becomes, for her, a symbol of feminine strength. From a feminist perspective, her work crosses boundaries between different communities and invites visitors to reflect on a shared past. (Guinevere Ras) The project Reciting Footsteps aims to make connections to the plantation ground by historical documents such as archival contract of my ancestor (Hasowa Magai) that migrated from India to Suriname during the time of indentured labour (1873-1920) ). Besides this I want to trace several pages from archival missionary diaries (1862) describing the period after abolition of slavery. The idea is that the archival narratives of Magai starts a dialogue. By making 4 creative steps that are based on diverse elements in my practise such as video-work, photography and performance I create a basis for an installation. The steps consist of activating the pages of a diary and Sutterlin script, document the plantation ground, sound recordings of women in Suriname, bodily engagement on plantation ground.

**Why do you have a face like Sopropo? In Kruispunt 2020-2025 Wereldmuseum Rotterdam - Collection** - Why do you have a Face like Sopropo? was inspired by the project Lewis undertook in 2015 when she was in search of archival images from the documented journey of missionaries based close by a village in Dresden. While undertaking the research she encountered Kerela in the 'shops' with Indian and Pakistani workers, she imagined the journeys of the vegetables from India to Germany similar as that of her ancestors has undertaken more than hundred years ago. While accumulating images of the Kerela she uses letters, email conversations exchanges with fellow neighbor Rabiya to discover the expressions that Kerela carries. (A bitter emotion and bitter face so to speak) The bitter gourd has a strong taste that can be associated with the history of migration that carries an emotional 'silence'. The separation from loved one's and the displacement did carry along a bitter 'aftertaste'. While contemplating food one can immediately associate with the street food in Kruiskade Rotterdam, the Hindustani community and their intersecting stories with Creole community and the everyday of consuming the food. Yet the more emotional layer that can be associated with bitter gourd is something more mysterious and unresolved that leads to a deeper association with the history of migration and it's emotional spectrum. The installation for the exhibition consists of photographic explorations with the Sopropo as well as a selection of archival images. The work has been made from 2015 until 2021 over in three locations, New Delhi, Paramaribo and Rotterdam.

**Reciting Footsteps of a Female Migrant Soerdi** - The exhibition was curated and created by researcher and artist Sarojini Lewis. Between 2021 and 2023, she conducted research at the KB into the history of migration (1873–1920) of Indian female indentured labourers (Hindostani people) in Suriname. She alternated her research periods at the KB with periods of working in Suriname. Lewis’s research focused on the period following the abolition of slavery and the transition to indentured labour. The exhibition was made possible in part with support from the Mondriaan Fund as part of the Commemoration Year of the History of Slavery. The starting point for Sarojini Lewis’s research at the KB was the book West Indische contractarbeiders in Suriname: 1863–1899 (Paramaribo, 2014). In this book, she found information about Soerdie, the first recorded Indian woman to migrate to Suriname as an indentured labourer, arriving via Barbados in 1868. Soerdie and her daughter survived for a relatively long time under the harsh conditions of plantation life at t’Vertrouwen, where seventeen Indian indentured labourers were employed. At the time, mortality among women, newborns, and children was high due to exploitation and unhygienic conditions on the plantations (H.E. Lamur, 2014). Soerdie’s story inspired Lewis to conduct further research. At the KB, she discovered rare books, letters, and travel accounts documenting the period from the years before the abolition of slavery to the transition to Indian indentured labour in Suriname (1820–1873). Using these sources, Lewis evokes fragments of Soerdie’s possible life through photography, video, and performance. Through embodiment and Saidiya Hartman’s concept of Critical Fabulation, she explores the gaps in historical records and gives space to stories and emotions that are absent from the archives. In doing so, she offers a different narrative of colonial history from a female perspective. During her nearly three years of research, Lewis worked on various former plantation grounds in Suriname, creating a photographic series that connects the landscapes of today with the historical sources she encountered at the KB. She also created short video works in which rituals are performed as part of a process of healing. By incorporating her own body and encounters with other Surinamese people, Lewis explores the layered histories of these places and asks how interconnected stories of Indigenous, Afro-Surinamese, and Hindostani communities can be told. One of the works features blueing, created in Nieuw Amsterdam in collaboration with visual artist Miguel Keerveld. Often associated with Afro-Surinamese culture, blueing is also part of Indigenous and Hindostani traditions. For Lewis, it represents the passing down of rituals across generations: she was bathed with blueing by her mother as a baby, and the tradition continues with her own daughter. The work also reflects on the high rate of infant mortality during Soerdie’s time and the many indentured women who died during or after childbirth. Lewis created a placenta-shaped sculpture using kusuwé, a red dye of Indigenous origin, as a reflection on birth, loss, and the interconnected histories of Suriname.

**A Watchfull Eye** - The Rijksmuseum is marking the 150th anniversary of the arrival in Suriname of the first Indian indentured labourers with a display of 30 photographs and objects from the first generations. Rijksmuseum curator Eveline Sint Nicolaas compiled this display in partnership with Sarojini Lewis, an artist and researcher specialising in the position of female Indian indentured labourers in Suriname. The display pays particular attention to the female perspective within the community that developed in Suriname following the abolition of slavery. 'The powerful photographs help you imagine what life must have been like for Female Indian indentured workers. The pictures are window onto the reality of this colonial history.' S. Lewis On 5 June 2023 it was exactly 150 years since the Lalla Rookh docked in Suriname carrying the first indentured labourers from India. It was just weeks before the end of the Dutch state-run scheme that obliged former enslaved people to continue working for plantation owners for a further ten years after the abolition of slavery. Plantation owners in the country were urgently searching for a new workforce. The Indian migrants (known as ‘Hindustanis’ in Suriname) were hoping that their five-year contract would enable them to liberate their family back home from famine. Contrary to what was promised, life in Suriname also consisted of poverty, exploitation and violence. Although employers were mainly interested in finding fit male labourers, women were also necessary for maintaining a stable community. Despite a mandatory quota for the number of women, there was always an imbalance between the sexes. This unequal relationship led to major social issues, but also offered opportunities to the women

**Disclosing Diaries - Eye on Art in the Eye Museum** - Film screening in the Eye (2025) Residency with metal band to develop music in WORM (2024) On 1 July 1863, the Netherlands abolished slavery – on paper. In reality, the ‘liberated’ of Suriname were compelled to continue working on the plantations for another ten years. More than 150 years later, the wounds inflicted by slavery have not yet healed. This year, visual artist Sarojini Lewis is contributing to the celebration of the ‘breaking of the chains’ with the film and accompanying spoken-word performance Disclosing Diaries, showing what slavery meant and the effect it continues to have on later generations. Lewis looked into the history of the Berg en Dal plantation and the descendants of the enslaved Stutgard family. The plantation was operated by an evangelical Christian community called the ‘Hernnhuter Broedergemeenschap’. These Herrnhuters were active in missionary work in Suriname, and forced the plantation workers to give up their own rituals and beliefs. In her film and performance, Sarojini Lewis investigates gender patterns, intimacy and family relationships among formerly enslaved Creole women and men, drawing on missionaries’ diaries, family albums, studies of colonialism and historical records held in the archives of the Evangelische Broedergemeente in Suriname. For the film’s soundtrack and the spoken-word performance, Lewis worked with Surinamese heavy metal band Ravech, two of whom are descendants of the Stutgard family. Together with them she enacts rituals, stories and sounds.

**From Surviving To Thriving** - In July 2020 three artists from Rotterdam with a shared history and diverse artistic skills and visions, decided to collaborate. We met after in the semi-permanent exhibition ‘Crossroads’ for which Sarojini Lewis made an art installation in Wereldmuseum titled: ‘Why do you have a face like a Sopropo?’ For the project ‘From Surviving to Thriving’ we aimed to bring together creative works of various artists of Indo-Surinamese descent. We felt the importance of highlighting these unique perspectives and experiences, as growing up in The Netherlands we have all felt the heavy absence of black-and people of colour in the arts. We noticed a lack of visual representation while trying to pursue a career in the arts with a migrant background. Traces of our backgrounds are left by our ancestors who once departed by boat from Calcutta in India to arrive in Paramaribo, Suriname (1973-1916). We had several conversations in which we discussed various gender sensitive experiences besides being Indo-Surinamese. With ‘From Surviving to Thriving’ we create a platform for South Asians, having in mind a complex history of indentured labour, who courageously disrupt dominant narratives. - Sarojini Lewis

New Currents

Datum: 29-10-2026 t/m 29-10-2026

Locatie: Nieuwe Instituut

In samenwerking met: Setareh Noorani

Ports as Portals Ports are more than just gateways for trade – they are places where histories, people and ideas converge. Port cities across the Indian Ocean, and Rotterdam itself, share legacies of colonialism, migration and global commerce. Het essay, geïllustreerd met beelden die Lewis samen met grafisch ontwerper Edwin van Gelder maakte, is een fragment uit haar kunstenaarsboek Waves of Ternate: Collecting ambiguous memories by a Pearl Diver without a name. Sarojini Lewis zal ook bijdragen

https://nieuweinstituut.nl/en/events/new-currents-symposium-2026

Omslag

Datum: 28-06-2026 t/m 30-09-2026

Locatie: Rijksmuseum Meermanno, Huis van het boek

In samenwerking met: MainStudio JapSamBooks

Voor deze tentoonstelling is het thema 'verandering' verbeeld in boeken. De makers exposeren hun werk op een heel bijzondere plek: de historische Boekzaal. Dit is een van de best bewaard gebleven negentiende-eeuwse museumopstellingen van Nederland.

A Shift of Identity by Sarojini Lewis investigates the work of contemporary Bhojpuri (North Indian) artists from the diaspora in Mauritius, Suriname, and Guyana, who explore their complex identities and heritage through their art.

Quickscan 3

Datum: 25-06-2026 t/m 22-11-2026

Locatie: Nederlands Fotomuseum

In samenwerking met: Mainstudio and Japsambooks

The photobook remains a place where images come together through rhythm, sequence and form. Film, video and performance create space for stories that cannot be captured in a single image.
A Shift of identity investigates the work of contemporary Bhojpuri (North Indian) artists from the diaspora in Mauritius, Suriname, and Guyana, who explore their complex identities and heritage through their art.

https://nederlandsfotomuseum.nl/en/nu-te-zien/quickscan-3/

Onze Koloniale Erfenis

Datum: 27-06-2022 t/m 27-06-2027

Locatie: Wereldmuseum Amsterdam

In samenwerking met: Wereldmuseum Amsterdam

Exhibition & Exhibition Catalogue

Self-portraits during the timespan of four years on days of Holi are combined with some colonial documents I found. I investigated how colonization overtime has led to sexual exploitation and physical exhaustion, evident in some schedules of colonial representations on diseases on board the ships during the three month transportation from India to Suriname.
Colonialism is not a thing of the past. The exhibition shows how colonialism shaped the world of today.

https://amsterdam.wereldmuseum.nl/en/whats-on/exhibitions/our-colonial-inheritance

Kruispunt Rotterdam

Datum: 03-09-2020 t/m 01-05-2027

Locatie: ROTTERDAM

https://www.wereldmuseum.nl/nl/zien-en-doen-in-het-wereldmuseum/tentoonstellingen/kruispunt-rotterdam/sarojini-lewis

Sarojini Lewis

New Currents

Omslag

Quickscan 3

Onze Koloniale Erfenis

Kruispunt Rotterdam

Sarojini Lewis Disclosing Diaries

Sarojini Lewis Mamotica: narratives of Bitter Taste

Sarojini Lewis Visuals of Bhojpuri Female Migrants in the Caribbean

Sarojini Lewis Reciting Footsteps