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 is a Fijian-Australian artist and curator whose work uses personal grief to account for ancestral loss.

Recent works have used story-telling, objects and video to account for lost stories of Girmitiya (Indenture) from the Indian and Pacific oceans. Truth-telling and monument making has become a focal point of her current research in an attempt to decipher what is lost and the possibilities of futures.

Between 2017-18, Lal sought to globalise her practice with a prolonged stay in India, which led to periods of research in Nepal, Bangladesh and Fiji. She was the 2019 Create New South Wales Visual Arts Emerging Fellow, and 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 she received the QAGOMA Vida Lahey Scholarship. Lal’s work has been exhibited across Australia, and internationally.