Disclosure is a quarterly evening of discourse and ideas, a space of ambition and experimentation.

From art theory to contemporary identity, Disclosure presenters will share knowledge and experience from their own unique vantage points, challenging us to see the world through a different lens, if only for an evening.

In this edition of DISCLOSURE for Other Horizons titled Ask the Sea, exhibiting artist Jasmine Togo-Brisby (4^th Generation Australian South Sea Islander) joins writer, activist and Curator of Ideas for the Perth Festival, Sisonke Msimang (Western Australia/ South Africa) in a captivating dialogue which charts Australian slavery, the trafficking of brown bodies across the Pacific, the body politic, South Sea Islander identity and belonging in the place we now we call Australia.

About Jasmine Togo-Brisby

Jasmine Togo-Brisby was born in Murwillumbah, New South Wales in 1982, she was raised in Townsville, Queensland from the age of 8.  She studied at the Queensland College of Art, Australia and Massey University, New Zealand (BFA 2018, MFA 2022).

Togo-Brisby has a research driven practice which examines the historical practice of ‘blackbirding’, the romanticised colloquialism for the Pacific slave trade.  She delves into her own personal history and that of the Pacific slave trade, which saw her great-great-grandparents taken from Vanuatu and transported to Australia in 1899 under slave-labour policies employed by the Australian government.  As a fourth-generation Australian South Sea Islander her works address the complexities of contemporary South Sea Islander culture and identity.  She investigates complicated relationships of power, cultural identity and political systems and continues to build upon her research and artworks employing, installation, painting, lens-based media and sculpture.

Togo-Brisby sustains an on-going dialogue within contemporary discourse where she is committed to including South Sea narratives and identity globally.   She has presented at international conferences including; 2019 Fiji International conference on forced labour & migration; 2020 Princeton University: The Global Plantation Symposium; 2021 University of Oxford: Women, Memory & Transmission Postcolonial Perspectives from the Arts and Literature, amongst many others.

Togo-Brisby is represented by Page Galleries and her works can be found in numerous public and private collections throughout Australia and New Zealand.

About Sisonke Msimang

Known for her works on race, gender and democracy, Sisonke Msimang has authored two books – Always Another Country: A Memoir of Exile and Home (Text Publishing, 2018) and The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela (Text Publishing, 2019). In 2021, she won the $60,000 Western Australian Writer’s Fellowship as part of the Premier’s Book Awards.

Sisonke makes regular appearances on news program like The Drum, Q&A and SBS’ Insight, and has written for The Guardian, Sydney Morning Herald, the New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, Bloomberg, and Al Jazeera. Since moving to Perth in 2014, she has worked with dozens of Western Australian storytellers through her on-going work as the head of Storytelling at the Centre for Stories in Northbridge. Sisonke joined Perth Festival as Curator of the 2020 Literature & Ideas Program.

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