Field NotesOvercaste Exhibit
A landmark exhibit for caste visibility in BC — rooted in ancestral truth, intergenerational healing, and community-first storytelling.
SummaryYear
2023-2024 ☔︎
Offerings
Design – Visual identity, logo, web design
Strategy – Festival roadmap, Luminaries program consulting
Story – Newsletters, community voice, brand messaging
Stewardship – Youth engagement strategy, founder mediation, equity-first planning
Industry
Cultural Exhibitions, Archival Storytelling, Public History
The Overcast Exhibit – Burnaby Village Museum (in collaboration with Anita Lal + UFV South Asian Studies Institute)
The Overcast Exhibit was the brainchild of activist and cultural producer Anita Lal, envisioned as a public reckoning with caste suppression in British Columbia’s South Asian communities. Featuring the research and archival work of UFV SASI’s Dr. Sharanjit Kaur Sandhra, the exhibit aimed to challenge the dominant narratives of Punjabi and Sikh Canadian history by naming caste — and honouring the Dalit contributions too often erased.
Himmat Media was brought on as consulting story strategists, rooted in long-standing collaborations with Anita and a proven record of community-centred exhibit building.
Our mandate: help bridge community wisdom and archival rigour, while holding the stories with care, complexity, and truth.
Our Approach
We began by listening. Through collaborative meetings with exhibit leads, interviewees, and researchers, we helped co-develop open-ended narrative prompts that would allow participants to voice their truths without extraction or imposed bias. This meant careful scripting, consent-based language development, and refining how interviews could honour the speaker’s rhythm, not the institution’s.
We also acted as story translators — interpreting academic research and oral accounts through a community-first lens. This allowed us to bridge scholarly rigour with heart, soul, and lived experience, all while remaining aligned with the exhibit’s and Anita’s ultimate goal: not neutrality, but liberatory truth.
Design Process & Strategy
While the visual identity was developed by brilliant Vancouver-based artist Jessie Sohpaul, our role was to ensure that all public-facing touchpoints — from social media posts to onsite captions — reflected tone, texture, and respect. We advised on community-safe language, provided editing support for panels and digital materials, and helped weave a thematic narrative arc through the exhibit that moved from erasure to emergence.
As per Anita’s needs, we infused elements of poetic narration, folk memory, and ancestral codes into the storytelling — echoing patterns from past Himmat-led exhibitions like The Himmat Exhibit and Personal Platitudes — while still supporting a rigorous, accessible archive.
Results and Impact
The Overcast Exhibit has drawn hundreds of thousands of visitors to the Burnaby Village Museum since launch.
It has become a nationally referenced model for caste-based public storytelling in Canada.
The exhibit was acclaimed in local press for its unapologetic approach to hard truths — while maintaining softness, care, and community accountability.
Internally, our approach to interview design helped participants feel seen and protected, with many expressing that the process was itself healing.
As one Community Elder shared during the opening:
"This is the first time I’ve ever seen our pain treated as knowledge. Not shame. Not gossip. But truth."
We continue to support cultural producers like Anita in future exhibits, community archives, and narrative justice initiatives — ensuring our stories are told with us, not just about us.
Related Projects/Next Steps
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Chaa Da Cup Series with Harnaaz Kaur Grewal
Tea, truth, and transformation. We helped shape Chaa Da Cup into a visual storytelling platform rooted in therapeutic dialogue, cultural identity, and healing. What began as one woman’s reflection grew into a powerful archive of South Asian womanhood, racialized therapy, and intergenerational resilience.
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Himmat: Celebrating the Women Around Us
Everyday stories, extraordinary courage. We crafted the Himmat Exhibit as a storytelling platform honouring immigrant South Asian women in BC — blending community-sourced narratives with cultural strategy to archive the strength that shaped us.
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Zikulu – Online Roots, Real-World Reach
We co-developed Zikulu’s strategy, design, and content — translating African Friendship Society’s teachings into a digital platform. From heritage-based quizzes to legal frameworks, we built a legacy-rooted learning ecosystem.