shivanjani lal
Shivanjani Lal

Shivanjani Lal Bio

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 the 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.

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Shivanjani Lal Shivanjani Lal is a Fijian-Australian artist and curator. She is a member of the indentured labourer diaspora from the Indian and Pacific oceans. Which ties her to a long history of familial movement; her work uses personal grief to account for ancestral loss and healing.

Lal employs storytelling as a methodology to account for lost histories and seed futures for healing. Using intimate images of family, sourced from photo albums, along with video and images from contemporary travels to the Asia-Pacific, and objects (sourced and handmade) which reconstruct temporary landscapes. These landscapes act as shifting sites for diasporic healing - from which audiences emerge. 

She is the recipient of the 2019 Create New South Wales Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship, was a 2020 Studio artist at Parramatta Artists' Studios and the 2020 Georges Mora Fellow, and graduated with distinction from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2021. Currently she is a studio artist in the City of Sydney Visual Arts residency.

Lal’s work has been shown in Australia, New Zealand, India, Barbados, France, Indonesia and the United Kingdom.