Shivanjani Lal
CURATOR
FIJI & AUSTRALIA
Shivanjani Lal (she/her) is a Fijian-Australian artist and curator whose work uses personal grief to account for ancestral loss. Recent works have used storytelling, objects, and video to account for lost histories and explore narratives of indenture and migratory histories from the Indian and Pacific Oceans. In Lal’s work, reading and objects guide audiences through lived and imagined narratives that attempt to decipher what is lost and the possibilities of futures. You can see more of her work on her website, follow her on Instagram, and read more about her artistic practice in the following interview.
Art can make social change possible by sharing personal and intimate viewpoints on what can be difficult topics. Shedding light through a specific perspective can challenge us to see something that in a drier setting we might not allow ourselves to see or feel.Shivanjani Lal
What role do you think art can play in social change?
I think art can make social change possible by sharing personal and intimate viewpoints on what can be difficult topics. Shedding light through a specific perspective can challenge us to see something that in a drier setting we might not allow ourselves to see or feel.
How would you describe your artistic practice as it relates to supporting social movements?
My work uses intimate moments, such as family archives and storytelling, along with objects, to have conversations around what it means to be a girmitya, a descendant of indentured Indian laborers brought to Fiji to work on plantations by European settlers. I try and understand my perspective which is a diasporic one, but also one that still has access to our homeland. I want to amplify the voices of women in these spaces and use images of my grandmother and her story to tell the stories of my community through this lens.
Featured work
