South East Interference Volume 3

Image – Shivanjani Lal, Khet Installation, Cement Fondu, Between Suns Exhibition

Eric Bridgeman & Shivanjani Lal

14 September – 9 November 2019

Official opening 6pm Friday 13 September

 

Shivanjani Lal is a twice removed Fijian Indian Australian artist whose history is intrinsically linked to the indentured labour diaspora of Asia and the Pacific. She works across mediums to explore her cultural dislocation, which seeks to account for memory, erasure, healing, and the archive.

Currently Lal uses spatial and material activations along with video to create documents which analyse her personal narratives in the broader context of the social history which brought her family from India to Fiji and now to Australia. This is done in an effort to redefine the history of the Indo-Fijian Community away from the narratives produced by the current political climate in both Fiji and India.

Her current research posits that history has obliterated and obfuscated the communal memory of her community but that her body and the landscapes she is from hold onto both.

 

Eric Bridgeman is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Australia and Papua New Guinea. The dominant focus of his work involves the discussion of social-cultural issues and often involves the depiction of a solitary figure among the detritus of a particular cultural domain.

More recently, Bridgeman has developed a series of collaborative projects which are carried out with and among his people in PNG’s Chimbu province. These projects focus on the crafting and design of traditional shield designs from his family’s region in a bid to preserve cultural practices among his people.