Surrey Art Gallery exhibit explores the history of migrant labour in B.C.

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Through textiles, illustrations, ceramics, and animation, Jagdeep Raina explores the history of South Asian farm workers in B.C. throughout the 1970s and ‘80s in Ghosts in the Fields.

The free art exhibit, on display until Dec. 15 at the Surrey Art Gallery, includes multimedia works about migrant labour under the Canadian Farmworkers Union, concentrated in B.C. 

“I was listening to farmers who were working 14 hours a day, getting paid $1 a day, just horrible, horrible conditions,” says Raina, an interdisciplinary artist who focuses on Punjabi history and the diaspora.

Media artist Craig Berggold, filmmaker Anand Patwardhan, as well as several farm workers and activists contributed to the research process, which included Raina collecting oral histories and archival materials such as verbal storytelling and cultural objects. 

“It took three or four years to really gather just the material, and all the types of nuances that I wanted to tackle when it came to the stories I wanted to tell,” Raina says. “The work started to be made in 2023. It took about a year and a half to make all the work.” 

The exhibition showcases the invisible labour that is often experienced generationally by farm workers, women, and their “forgotten history [as] people at the bottom of the social hierarchy, the ones that do all the work,” Raina says. 

Efforts for better wages and working conditions, the need for unionization, ending violence, and addressing climate change are highlighted in the works. 

The “Manic Escape” quilt piece portrays the effects of the Green Revolution, which brought about various changes in Punjab’s agricultural output in the 1970s.

“Textiles [have an] emphasis on slowing down because it’s all hand embroidered,” Raina says. “The history of quilting is so tied to domestic work. It’s so tied to the history of labour, so I wanted to implement that labour into this work.” 

Ghosts in the Fields also has a short animated film which utilizes storytelling through the character Manmeet, depicting farm labour in Richmond.

“The animations can take quite a long [time] to do because the stop motion images that I draw, they’re all done by hand. So I think duration is something that differentiates the mediums,” Raina says.

The “Black Widow Spider” ceramic piece represents the fragile agricultural ecosystem influenced by interactions with the land and climate change. 

“The black widow spider is a type of spider that’s proliferating more and more, attacking the crops because of the rise in temperature,” Raina says. 

Several additional resources are featured in the exhibit, including relevant artist books, novels, and textbooks that provide further context of the art mediums and historic cultural references.

“My inspiration comes from a vast array of artists, writers, and filmmakers whose work I look at, [including] community organizers and activists. There wasn’t one specific inspiration behind creating the work,” Raina says. 

“Art can be a space to talk about [atrocities] that peel off the Band-Aid of cultural and historical amnesia that we tend to live in, and actually be like, ‘No, we can’t sweep these histories under the rug.’” 

To learn more about Ghosts in the Fields, visit www.bit.ly/3ZjRhh0.