2020 RECIPIENT OF THE GEORGES MORA FELLOWSHIP

Shivanjani Lal is a twice-removed Fijian-Indian-Australian artist and curator. As an artist living in Australia, she is tied to a long history of familial movement; her work uses personal grief to account for ancestral loss and trauma. She is a member of the indentured labourer diaspora from the Indian and Pacific oceans. She employs intimate images of family, sourced from photo albums, along with video and images from contemporary travels to the Asia-Pacific to reconstruct temporary landscapes. These landscapes act as shifting sites for diasporic healing - from which she emerges. A fundamental concern in her work is how art develops and represents culture as it transitions between contexts, while also probing the experiences of women in these situations of flux.

Over the next year, Lal will be building on her current research into Indentured Labour of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. This research considers 2020 as a date which marks the centenary of the end of indentured labour. This historical moment is the crux of what Lal will be reflecting upon as she embarks on this research in the United Kingdom and Bangladesh. She will be using this award to support her time in the UK visiting the Ameena Gafoor Institute, the Goldsmiths Film Archives. During this time she will also be mentored by Mauritian British artist Shiraz Bayjoo. In conclusion she will do a residency at the Bengal Art Foundation, in Dhaka Bangladesh.

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