Limited edition Jasmine Togo-Brisby prints for sale

From 26 July 2025, Pātaka is filling all our galleries with a large-scale, mid-career survey of work by Brisbane-based, South Sea Island artist Jasmine Togo-Brisby.

Jasmine’s exhibition at Pātaka, ungeographic, will be accompanied by an ambitious publication designed by award-winning design studio Extended Whānau. But we need your help to ensure it’s a publication worthy of Jasmine’s stellar art practice. In 2024 alone, Jasmine participated in the Adelaide Biennale, the Busan Biennale, the Bangkok Biennale and the Asia Pacific Triennial.

We are selling 100 limited-edition prints that Jasmine has generously made available to the Pātaka community. The work, I sell the Shadow, (2025), is a digital print with archival pigments on archival cotton rag paper and measures 148 x 210mm.

The prints cost NZ$200 each and can be collected from Pātaka in Porirua, or sent out nationally or internationally. A small fee for postage and packaging will be added at checkout.

The title of the print, I sell the Shadow, refers to the 1864 photographic portraits of abolitionist and activist for African-American civil rights and women’s rights, Sojourner Truth. Born into slavery but escaping to freedom in 1826 with her infant daughter, Truth not only sat for multiple versions of her portrait, but also used it to raise awareness and funds for her activist activities. The card mount surrounding the photograph featured the text “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance”. Quite literally owning (and in fact copyrighting) her likeness—her ‘shadow’—Truth intervenes in the history of human trafficking, controlling the sale of her image to support causes she championed. 

Similarly, in I sell the Shadow, Jasmine employs the likeness of herself, her daughter and her mother, all pictured sitting in a rowboat in the waters of Port Chalmers – the same waters that hold the sunken remains of the slave ship Don Juan.

Jasmine Togo-Brisby has been pivotal in raising awareness of Australian South Sea Islanders, the Australian-born descendants of people brought to Australia as “indentured labourers” between 1847 and 1904 from over 80 Moana nations. Her own great-great-grandparents were taken from Vanuatu as part of the Pacific slave trade.

Jasmine uses archival research, her own family history and materials associated with South Sea Islanders as anchors for her art. Working across painting, early photographic techniques and sculpture, Jasmine’s work attempts to create a visual identity specific to Australian South Sea Islanders and trace the wake of the slave trade histories in this region.

The book, which we plan to launch at the opening of ungeographic, will feature texts by Jasmine Togo-Brisby; Jasmine’s sister and studio manager, Simone Togo-Brisby; Ioana Gordon-Smith, Lead Curator at Pātaka; Imelda Miller, Curator of Torres Strait Islander and Pacific Indigenous Studies at Queensland Museum; Ruth McDougall, Curator, Pacific Art, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art; Nina Tonga, Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Hawai’i, and Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Associate professor of Black Diasporic art at Princeton University.

Help us fund this important publication, PURCHASE one of Jasmine Togo-Brisby’s limited edition prints.