PHOTO2022: A Bell Rings Across the Valley Exhibition

Meet the Curator

• Shivanjani Lal

  

  Shivanjani Lal is a Fijian-Australian artist and curator. Her work explores personal grief to account for ancestral loss. Exploring narratives of indenture and migratory histories from the Indian and Pacific oceans, works uses story-telling, objects and video to account for lost histories and cede futures for healing. 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. Lal’s work has been shown and curated work in Australia, New Zealand, India, United Kingdom, Barbados and France. 

Meet the Artists

• Ashfika Rahman

  

  Ashfika Rahman lives and works in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Her practice straddles art and documentary, drawing inspiration from 19th century prints which she recontextualises using contemporary media. Photography is the predominant medium through which she expresses her views on complex systemic social issues. She found her voice in photography when she discovered her social activist mother trying to follow her faith in social work. She began to work on marginal people of Bangladesh, especially about the violence on minor, tribal or ethnic group of people in remote hills or a village in peripheries of Bangladesh. In each of her work she try to challenge the mainstream perspective towards these issues.  

• Indu Antony

  

  Indu Antony is a transdisciplinary artist based out of Bangalore and Kerala, India. She is known to explore tonalities of inward discussions which later on bursts out into the communal spaces. Her work primarily revolves around the notion of spaces and their intangible character in relation to the gendered body as a site of representation by understanding feministic stands which gives way to performances and installations. Her recent works use a lot of her hair as a metaphor for memory. She recently started her own self publishing initiative called Mazhi Books under which she has published her first book – Why can’t bras have buttons? which was the runners up for Al Kazi photo book of the year and one of the Photobook of the year at Fast Forward. Her second book Directory of the outsiders won the Experimental Co-operative Art Grant. Indu Antony has participated in several group exhibitions including the Chennai Photo Biennale 2019; Serendipity Arts Festival, 2018; Kochi-Muziris Biennale (Collateral), 2018-19; Foto Fest Biennale, Houston, 2018; Queer Asia Photo Exhibition, London, 2017 and Photo Kathmandu, Nepal, 2015. Her project Cecilia’ed received the Public Art Grant by FICA in 2019. She won the Toto funds Award for photography for the year 2011.  

• Sheelasha Rajbhandari

  

  Sheelasha Rajbhandari is a visual artist, cultural organiser, and co-founder of the artist collective Artree Nepal (founded in 2013) based in Kathmandu. She is interested in exploring alternative and plural narratives through folktales, folklore, oral histories, mythologies, material culture, performance, and rituals and placing them as evidence, along with references to mainstream history and narratives. Her long-term research projects and artistic practice often juxtapose these contradictions and synthesise the knowledge and experiences that result from individual and collective discourses. Through her work, she frequently tries to encounter simple yet socially taboo subject matters, with a focus on women’s struggles, celebrating their resilience. Her recent works explore the current transformation of Nepal from a once important centre for trans-Himalayan trade to a geopolitical situation in flux between the two emerging world powers of India and China. Rajbhandari is very careful about choosing materials and methods that align with her conceptual framework. She prefers mediums and materials that add meaning to ideas and have their own significance. 

• Devika Bilmoria

  

  Devika Bilimoria is a multi-disciplinary artist and photographer. Their practice expands on notions of queering, materiality, and time to disrupt and examine the construction of gestures, bodies and cultural experiences, with an emphasis on diasporic South-Asian dance and ritual. Having trained in the Indian dance form of Bharatanatyam, as well as Fine Arts and Media Studies at RMIT, their art forms span performance, moving/still image and installation—harnessing participatory processes, improvisation, experimentation and embodied listening to explore sensations of time. They have shown work at the National Portrait Gallery, the Monash Gallery of Art, Montsalvat Gallery and Dancehouse. 

• Shwe Wutt Hmon

  

  Shwe Wutt Hmon is a freelance documentary photographer based in Yangon, Myanmar, and also works as an independent researcher for UN agencies and international organisations.  

  Shwe’s works focus on feminism, collective identity, human relationships, exploring mental health and telling intimate stories of places and people that are close to her heart. She tells personal stories from which she connects and examines larger social issues; vice versa she works on social stories reflecting and drawing from her position within the issue. Shwe uses photography as her main medium and incorporates videos, texts, poems, paintings and drawings of her own or collaborating with others. 

Catalogue