OBSERVATIONAL HISTORIES

10 - 27 Jun 2020

@BLINDSIDE_ari

Shivanjani Lal

‘Never again will a single story be told as though it's the only one.’

– John Berger

Observational Histories is an exhibition which is one part survey, and one part archive of moving image.

Informed by a prolonged 15 month stay in India between 2017-2018. The exhibition will include 5 video works made during this time and an archive of moving image collected mainly from the back of cabs.

The Five works are:

If we could be birds in each others Skies
में यहाँ नहीं हुँ (I am not here)
Taxi Bhaat
Kala Pani
Khet

These works are not a singular narrative but rather a series of observations which move the viewer through loss, political histories, ideas of returning, gestures of healing and movement.

The archive presented alongside these video works were captured during often long, lonely cab rides where I protected myself from the bustle of the city I was living in (Bombay). Attempting to connect and understand a landscape I was of, but no longer from.

Observational Histories is an attempt at showing an expanded studio and how the lines can blur between the archive and the execution of an idea.

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.