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.

Photo Credit IMMA and Evanna Devine

Shivanjani Lal is Fijian-Australian artist whose work uses personal grief to account for ancestral loss.

Recent works have used storytelling, objects and video to account for lost stories of Girmitiya (Indenture) stories from the Indian and Pacific oceans centring women’s perspectives. A primary concern in her work is how to communicate difficult histories with empathy, without transferring the violence of these histories to audiences. Truth-telling and monument making has become a focal point of her research in an attempt to decipher what is lost and the possibilities of futures. 

Between 2017-18, Shivanjani sought to globalise her practice with a prolonged stay in India, which led to periods of research in Nepal, Bangladesh and Fiji. In 2019, she was the recipient of the Create New South Wales Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship, as well as the 2020 Georges Mora Fellow. In 2021 she graduated with distinction from Goldsmiths, University of London with a Masters in Artists Film and Moving Image. In 2023 Shivanjani received the QAGOMA Vida Lahey Scholarship and the Linden New Art’s Juncture Art Prize. In 2024 she participated in the Art Gallery of New South Wales Paris Cité International des Arts studio residency program. In 2025 she participated in the Sharjah Biennial: To Carry, and premiered new work in a solo exhibition at Western Sydney University’s Margaret Whitlam Galleries. In 2026 she was a Dwell Here resident at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA).

Her work has been exhibited across Australia, and internationally.