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Guest Editor: Athena Thebus
Issue 39: OceansPublished September 2019
‘मैंने एक छवि ली [I took an image]’Shivanjani Lal, 2019Video, 5min, 6sec
I took an image of my great grandmother home, I didn’t know.She crossed the oceans, Bay of Bengal, Indian, and into the PacificEither coerced, taken or by choice. A body moved from Bangalore / Arrokonam / BaShe was a Girmitiya a female indentured labourer.Working sugarcane fields in Fiji for CSR Australia Rebuilding a life for her, and her own.I took an image of my great grandmother to Bombay, not her home but the place I call home in India.I didn’t know; I crossed the oceans: Pacific, Indian, and into the Arabian Sea.My body moved: Korotogo, Lidcombe, Parel. Using my hands on this image I explore my relationship with this unknown relation. Using the image, erasure and voice to have a conversation with the woman who is the beginning point of my relationship with Fiji and also my relationship with India as well as my mother our only point of connection.
Because, I took an image of my great grandmother home, and I didn’t know.
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.