Spread Over the Ocean Bed: Nirveda Alleck

A woman stands still in shallow water, at the exact point where the land ends and the ocean begins. We do not know whether she is arriving or leaving. Her body is transparent: the coastline passes through her, clouds drift into her shoulders, while beside her floats a boulder covered in seaweed, bound with a blue rope and held by a thread. Little by little, the body, the stone and the landscape seem to belong to the same thing.

Beneath her feet lies a continent.

This is not an image invented by Nirveda Alleck. Beneath Mauritius there really are traces of an ancient continental landmass, sunk into the Indian Ocean and named Mauritia by geologists. In the island's rocks, zircon crystals almost three billion years old have been found, infinitely older than the land that holds them today.

It is hard to think of an image closer to Alleck's work: something can disappear from the surface without ceasing to exist.

This is where Insular Variations II - Arise takes shape, begun in 2016 and taken up and re-edited by the artist ten years later. But it is also from here that the whole exhibition can be read. Alleck looks for what remains beneath: beneath an island, beneath an image, beneath the history we have been told, beneath an identity that others would like to define on our behalf.

In her work, what lies submerged is not what has died. It is what keeps on acting without being seen.

In Arise, even the artist gives up full control over what happens. Wind, water, sand, salt and time enter the creative process as collaborators. The female figure remains on the threshold between land and ocean, while the landscape does not stand behind her: it passes through her. The image wavers between the burnt grey of an antique print and the colour of living matter, as if past and present kept surfacing one inside the other.

Only once, on the water, does the phrase that gives the exhibition its title appear. It does not say what is spread over the ocean bed. It may be the continent, it may be the bodies of the crossings, it may be memory, it may be everything that the sea and history have not given back.

From that moment, the journey changes depth. It is no longer only about what lies beneath an island, but about what may lie beneath a person.

In the large frieze of Continuum Dakar, Alleck meets men and women in the street, asks them to pose, photographs them and then paints them, taking away everything that might explain who they are. The street, the wall, the shop, the neighbourhood disappear. What remains are the bodies, rendered with an almost stubborn precision: the folds of the clothing, the skin, the posture, the gaze. Beside each figure appears a double.

We see them perfectly, and yet we cannot classify them.

This is a reversal of the colonial gaze, which photographed people within their context precisely in order to turn individuals into types, origins, categories. Alleck does the opposite: she shows the person and removes the label. She does not hide the individual; she protects them from our need to define them. This is where the work meets the thought of Édouard Glissant and his right to opacity: the right of every human being not to be entirely explained, translated and deciphered by the gaze of the other.

In How Dark Are Your Thoughts, painted in Paris in 2019, this question becomes even more intimate. How much of ourselves must we reveal for someone to consider us understandable? And why should those perceived as "other" be obliged to explain themselves again and again? Alleck does not answer by becoming more transparent. She defends what remains opaque.

Transcendence, too, grows out of something history has left behind. The artist starts from a view engraved by Jacques Désiré Milbert in 1812 and intervenes on the image by giving its colour back. The gesture is simple only in appearance: bringing back colour means bringing something back into the present, freeing it from the motionless distance of the archive.

Then the gaze shifts once more. From collective history to her own. Nirveda Alleck is a third-generation descendant of Indian indentured labourers who arrived in Mauritius after the abolition of slavery. She grew up among stories, images and rituals handed down by her parents and grandparents, but she knows that distance changes what we inherit. What is lived memory for one generation can become a story for the next, and a symbol for the one after that.

In Divine Weapons, the artist physically enters this inheritance. She depicts herself crouching beside a crocodile, holding attributes drawn from Hindu iconography, before a deity who watches her without intervening. She is not illustrating a myth. She is trying to understand how much that myth still belongs to her.

The same question returns in She had many thoughts in her head, but this time there is no need to look for another face. The faces are all hers. Seven heads, seven expressions, seven possibilities of the same person hang suspended behind her, while a crocodile rests at her feet. The double that in Continuum Dakar accompanied strangers multiplies and turns back on the artist. Perhaps this is the point: an identity is never just one thing.

Heart on Leaves, the most recent work, carries this reflection into an image almost disarming in its simplicity. An anatomical heart is cut from floral fabric; its veins are embroidered in red thread, while around it the leaves are painted one by one. Real fabric and paint, matter and representation, coexist on the same surface. The heart itself is made of something that has travelled: it is sewn from a textile that carries another geography, another history, a passage between India, Europe and Mauritius. In the end, identity and belonging cease to be abstract concepts: they become something that is inherited, transformed, cut and stitched back together.

Arise ends by returning to silence. The sound of the waves and the wind fades away, and the image comes to a stop. But stopping does not mean ending.

There are lands that disappear beneath the ocean and go on existing. There are histories that are erased and go on acting. There are identities that cross countries, generations and bodies without being reducible to a single origin. Perhaps this is what is spread over the ocean bed. Not something we have lost, but something that, unseen, keeps on moving.

Antonella Pisilli