Glasgow
A sweet, earthy aroma of molasses hits you at the entrance to “Liquid Land,” Jasmine Togo-Brisby’s debut European solo exhibition (on view through September 6, 2026). The smell emanates from a large, corrugated steel drum resting on wooden railway sleepers just outside GoMA’s ground-floor gallery, where it serves as the perfect introduction to a richly atmospheric exploration of memory and belonging. Togo-Brisby’s site-specific works link the histories of her sugar plantation-working ancestors—she is an Australian South Sea Islander—to Glasgow’s role in the transatlantic slave trade; the neoclassical building that houses GoMA, for example, was originally built in the 18th century as the home of a local tobacco lord, and numerous nearby streets are named after slave owners.
The interconnected installations that make up “Liquid Land” are all concerned with “blackbirding,” the 19th-century practice of deceiving or kidnapping Pacific Islanders and using them as forced labor on Australian sugar plantations, an activity that continued after the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act had outlawed slavery in the British Empire. Inside the gallery, tall, arched windows have been blacked out, and the low lighting sets a somber and serious tone. Set within the grandeur of a barrel-vaulted space framed by a double colonnade of Corinthian columns, Grannies Hut (2026), a life-size, one-room wooden shack with a rusty corrugated iron roof, strikes a note of stark contrast. The front of the structure is covered with an enlarged reproduction of a 1920s black and white family photograph of the actual hut—built by Togo-Brisby’s great-great-grandmother. Inside, a steel washtub filled with pungent black treacle sits in the center, an opulent glass chandelier with its lights on hanging just above. The symbolism is clear: the extravagant luxury of the colonizer juxtaposed with the everyday poverty of those whose labor has created such wealth.
Behind the hut, an installation made from thousands of stitched-together crows’ feathers rests on the floor. Togo-Brisby often uses this material in reference to blackbirding and the importance of remembering. The work resembles a collection of discarded cloaks that converge and overlap, or perhaps it could be read as a series of islands, the spotlit gaps between them a proxy for the Pacific Ocean. There is something haunting and assertive about the piece, a sense that Togo-Brisby is reaching into the past and taking ownership of her ancestry. Writing in the exhibition handout, she explains that while the violence and trauma of blackbirding has left a generational scar still felt today, the relationship to this history is nuanced and complex. “Sugar is woven into the fibers of our being,” she says. “For South Sea Islanders the plantation was (and still is) a space of contradiction; it is simultaneously a place of confinement and violence, but also the site where our community and families were forged.”
By placing a re-creation of her ancestral home inside the former mansion of a slave owner, Togo-Brisby challenges and reasserts her personal origin story. The building becomes a site embedded with racist colonial history rather than a neutral gallery space, as she activates a dialogue about memory, identity, and place that, while exposing brutality, also delivers something calming, almost restful. The smell of molasses hanging in the air plays its part. “I find belonging in the sugar,” Togo-Brisby says, “in the aroma of sweetness.”
