Edi­son Boodoos­ingh

Re­sis­tance is an on­go­ing body of work by artist Natasha Ma­habir-Per­sad, ex­plor­ing Caribbean his­tor­i­cal mem­o­ry through the lives of peo­ple who re­sist­ed, chal­lenged or dis­rupt­ed sys­tems of pow­er.

Caribbean his­to­ry is of­ten pre­sent­ed through ma­jor events and fa­mil­iar fig­ures, but the peo­ple be­hind those his­to­ries can be­come re­duced to sym­bols—the rebel, the rev­o­lu­tion­ary, the mar­tyr or the hero.

Through vi­su­al sto­ry­telling and paint­ing, Ma­habir-Per­sad ex­am­ines these fig­ures be­yond their his­tor­i­cal iden­ti­ties, ask­ing: Who were these peo­ple be­fore they be­came his­tor­i­cal fig­ures? What did they fear, de­sire, be­lieve in or strug­gle with? What choic­es were avail­able to them, and what did re­sis­tance cost them?

Her in­ten­tion is to bring these fig­ures back in­to a more hu­man space, al­low­ing au­di­ences to see them as in­di­vid­u­als rather than sim­ply his­tor­i­cal sym­bols.

The work was al­so in­spired by a deeply per­son­al ex­pe­ri­ence in­volv­ing her grand­fa­ther, who de­vel­oped de­men­tia fol­low­ing a stroke. She be­gan paint­ing dif­fer­ent as­pects of his life and dis­play­ing the works in his room, hop­ing that see­ing fa­mil­iar im­ages would help him re­con­nect with mem­o­ries of his past.

Art ma­te­ri­als can be ex­pen­sive, and al­most every stage of the cre­ative process comes with a cost. Can­vas, paint, medi­ums, brush­es and oth­er sup­plies can add up quick­ly, par­tic­u­lar­ly when work­ing on larg­er pieces.

How­ev­er, Ma­habir-Per­sad has al­so be­come in­ter­est­ed in in­cor­po­rat­ing ma­te­ri­als that car­ry mean­ing with­in the work it­self. For her Whole­ness se­ries, for ex­am­ple, she used sand, riv­er stones and char­coal. These ma­te­ri­als were not sim­ply a way to re­duce ex­pens­es; they be­came an in­te­gral part of the mean­ing be­hind the work, con­nect­ing the fig­ures to the earth and their sur­round­ings.

Her ad­vice to young artists is to re­main au­then­tic and com­mit­ted to their cre­ative vi­sion.

“Stay true to your­self. Don’t com­pro­mise your vi­sion just to fit in­to a trend. I be­lieve artists have a deep re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to tell the truth, even when that truth is un­com­fort­able or ug­ly. That is our call­ing. It’s part of why we ex­ist.”