South

Asian

Artists

Explore

Their

Intricate

Roots,

featuring

Ravelle

Pillay

The painter Ravelle Pillay mines family lore and historical archives to bring to light her ancestors, who came as indentured laborers from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu to South Africa in the 19th century.

“It’s incredibly hard to find them and to place yourself,” she said. “You look for their names in the archives, and you have to associate their names with indenture numbers. And these indenture numbers could be right, or they could be wrong. Their names could be spelled correctly or spelled badly. They could be mistaken for somebody else,” she explained. “It’s evidence of a lack of care.”

Her paintings — whether of people in historical photographs or the landscapes in which they built their lives on a new continent — attempt to recreate for her forebears the care that they were denied back then. “Maybe there’s an intervention that I can create that’s about making the figures more comfortable, making a little more space for them.”