Matérialité

Mohini Chandra is an internationally renowned artist and researcher based in England, UK. Her artistic work expands from the personal scale of her multi-layered cultural identity into inquieries on the global flow of people and cultures. She inscribes herself in the history of the Indian diaspora in Fiji, which caused decades of mass immigration from India to the Pacific region in the late 19th century through the colonial “Indentured labour system”. From this transcultural perspective, Mohini Chandra reflects on the mutual conditionality of cultural identities in our globalised world, while critically engaging with the content of representation itself. Her visual practice adresses the role of the photograpic within certain hegemonic narratives that shape our imagery of migrants and indigenous communities today. Apart from this, she seeks alternate ways of storytelling, using a wide range of media. In the series Matérialité (2017) Mohini Chandra combines found and appropriated images from India and the Pacific, that she explored in the collections of the Musée du quai Branly in Paris. Within this institutional frame, her series also reflects on the museum‘s role as a site for preserving and disseminating normative visual culture that have proven to be very stable. Against this persistant mode of representation, which the archival image still provides, the artist raises the argument of the “unknowability” of colonial relationships and experiences. Since graduating from the Royal College of Art, Mohini Chandra‘s work has been exhibited worldwide in the USA, United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa and Nepal. Besides her participation in biennials, such as the Third Oceanic Performance Biennial (Auckland), the Biennial Focus Festival of Photography (Mumbai), the Houston FotoFest Biennial, as well as in the Chennai Photo Biennale, her work is held in international collections including the Arts Council Collection UK and Autograph(London). She is the receiver of numerous prestigious grants and awards