at Galerie Mirchandani+Steinruecke, Mumbai, India in 2022,[17][18] The Hushed History of Oblivion, at Stevenson, Cape Town, South Africa in 2023,[19][20] and Pennungal: Lives of Women and Girls, at David Zwirner, London, United Kingdom in 2024.
[24] David Zwirner gallery called the works ‘among the most directly autobiographical’ and described the project in a press release saying, ‘the paintings in this exhibition reflect on Joseph’s experiences and observations of the treatment of women and girls from her hometown of Parumala, an island village situated on the Pamba River’, adding, ‘the artist looks back at her formative early years, examining the societal and structural limitations that have long been imposed upon the women’, and that ‘her work offers an alternative approach to the artistic tradition of history painting—one in which everyday moments take on the heft of the extraordinary and… coalesce into a richly tapestried communal history.’[25] In a 2024 interview—published by David Zwirner—that covers in detail the moral strictures and patriarchal concepts of women’s purity and ‘pizhakkal’ [Malayalam for ‘going astray’ or ‘unchaste’] that governed the ‘bizarre moral universe’, of Keralan society during her childhood and adolescence, Sosa herself said the paintings in this series were ‘improvisations from memory of moments, experiences, people, places and so on.
In the large-scale triptych which shares its title with the exhibition, the figures are seen amid violence, resistance, toil, and domesticity, offering a cosmology of narratives.’[33] The series comprised 14 paintings including Abduction of Anima, Kuttanad, Kerala (2022)[34] April van Cochin and others detained in a defunct church, Cochin (2022-2023),[35] Unnamed Asian slave smoking his master’s pipe, Cape Town, saying ‘I work the whole time, I must also rest a little’ (2023),[36] besides the largescale triptych, The Hushed History of Oblivion (2022-2023).
[37] In an essay that summarised her inspiration, motives, and research for the project—published by Stevenson, Cape Town, in 2023 as a booklet[38]—the artist said the works were her homage to the victims of the Indian Ocean slave trade.
Of the people who were sold into slavery from Kerala and the Indian littoral, she wrote: ‘Cultivating wheat, barley, rye and grapes in the Cape Colony, working as porters at the port and as nurses and grave diggers at the VOC hospital in Cape Town, working cargo in the port of Manila, toiling in sugar and cocoa haciendas and the notorious obrajes, [and] peddling sugar and other produce through the streets of Acapulco and Mexico City, they walked into oblivion, with not even their countrymen remembering them, even collectively.
Joseph dips us into a brilliant but impermanent world.’[42] The series included noted works such as The Ferryman and his Jaundiced Child (2019)[43] Duck Farmers (2019-2021),[44] Frog Hunters (2021),[45] and Luffa Gatherers (2021).
[84] Peopled with a large number of figures, Sosa’s works have been characterised as tableaux marked by a ‘state of half-thereness’ that ‘vibrates with the comings and goings of’ a large number of characters inhabiting a world where ‘solitude is in short supply.’[85] River Pamba is also noted to be a ‘perennial character’[86] in several of Sosa Joseph’s works, playing a ‘silent yet omnipresent role’,[87] at times appearing ‘glassy, animated by shades of aquamarine and teal’,[88] and otherwise ‘dark and foreboding’.