Third Text
Mohini Chandra, DAY OF SHADOWS, 2020
Day of Shadows was made in July 2020 under COVID19 lockdown conditions. It takes images made in the photographic archives of the Musée du quai Branly, Paris, and combines them with local landscapes in Devon, both of which Chandra was contemplating daily.
Locations: The River Dart, the Dartington Estate, Dartmoor (Devon, UK); and the artist’s studio/archives
Matérialité (images from the archive) was made at the Musée du quai Branly, Paris, during an Australia Council Residency at the Cité International des Arts, 2017
Day of Shadows is published as a book by the ABC (Artists Book Collective) Publication Commission, Amsterdam Fund for the Arts, 2020
Mohini Chandra’s work deals with articulations of identity and globalised spaces, and the role of the photographic in relation to memory and migration. As a child, Chandra spent time in Fiji and travelled widely with her family within the Indian-Fijian diaspora. She has an interest in photographic histories and the processes of visual culture within colonial, anthropological and ethnographic discourses and the imagery of contemporary globalized cultures. Having previously worked across the Asia-Pacific region in search of diasporic narratives, her current project Paradise Lost examines the complexities of colonial seafaring through the archaeology of shipwrecks.
Since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1999, Chandra has exhibited widely, including in Paradise Now? Contemporary Art from the Pacific, Asia Society Museum, New York (2004); Out of India, Queens Museum of Art, New York (1998); 000ZeroZeroZero, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1999); The Artist and the Archive, Shoreditch Biennale (1998); Dislocations, the International Photography Triennial, Rovaniemi Museum, Finland (1997); and the First Johannesburg Biennale (1995). She has had solo exhibitions at the Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona Beach, Florida (2001); and the Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool (1997). Most recently, she has shown in the Focus Festival of Photography in Mumbai, and the Third Oceanic Performance Biennale in Auckland (2017); the Houston FotoFest Biennial (2018); Unquiet Moments, Courtauld Institute (2020); and Bittersweet, Casula Powerhouse Museum, Sydney (2020).
Her work is held in international collections in the UK and USA, including the UK’s Arts Council Collection, and is featured in major survey publications such as Art and Photography (Phaidon, 2012).
© Mohini Chandra 2020