Dr Mohini Chandra

Biography

Dr Mohini Chandra (PhD, RCA) is currently Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art (UAL), convener of the Empire and Place Research Network and member of Train (the Research Centre for Transnational Art Identity and Nation). Dr Chandra is an international artist and writer, with considerable experience of developing collaborative and interdisciplinary research projects. Much of her work considers the role of museums and archives, in forming our ideas of history and place and in shaping contemporary attitudes towards culture and identity. Her art practice and writing positions ‘vernacular’ or everyday collections of visual culture, such as family photographs within post-indenture Indian diaspora communities, as forming a more ‘fluid’ notion of identity- as opposed to the forms of fixity seen in ‘colonial’ photographic archives. For Chandra, it is within individual and collective memories, that the alternatives to official narratives can be found, clearly identifying the exploration of personal narrative as a decolonising and deconstructive strategy.

Chandra was previously AHRC Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts at the Royal College of Art (2000-2003), a post she took up following the successful completion of her PhD at the same institution. Whilst AHRC Fellow, she initiated the Cross Culture Seminar at the RCA (an early and decolonising initiative within Higher Education) and co-curated the exhibition ‘Presence’ a series of interventions by contemporary artists within the historic and of Leighton House in London exploring the orientalist spaces through contemporary art practice (in collaboration with the Royal Geographic Society and Anthropology at Goldsmiths). Since then, she has gone on to exhibit and publish a large body of work around the themes of decolonisation and its affects, in relation to global flows of people and the visual cultures of diaspora communities. She has exhibited in a wide range of international and biennale contexts and prestigious group exhibitions such as the Chennai Photo Biennale (2021-22), Houston Fostofest Biennial (2018), Third Oceanic Performance Biennale, Auckland (2017) and Confusion of Tongues: Art and the Limits of Language, The Courtauld Gallery, London (2016). Chandra is currently showing in ‘Entangled Pasts’, curated by Dorothy Price at the Royal Academy in London, in an exhibition that deconstructs the RA’s collections and history through a decolonising lens. Apart from AHRC funding, Chandra’s work has also been supported through the Arts Council, the British Council, the Australia Council and significant cultural organisations such as Autograph (association of Black Photographers). Her work has been discussed in a range of academic contexts including by Alice Correia, Allan deSouza and Mohini Chandra: Conceptual Photography, Migrations and the Articulation of South Asian Identities, Conceptualism – Intersectional Readings, International Framings; Situating ‘Black Artists and Modernism’ in Europe (pp.242-256), Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum, 2019.

Dr Chandra initiated the Empire and Place Research Network in 2021, while working at the Arts University in Plymouth, based on her relationship with the Box Museum and organisations such as the ‘Ships Project’, a local CIC and marine archaeology research group, when exploring the global links between shipwrecks on the Southwest coastline and colonial histories. This research collaboration resulted in an Arts Council funded commission ‘Paradise Lost’ for the Mirror Gallery in Plymouth for Chandra, who went on to be awarded ‘The Arts Institute Film Commission’ in association with the Box, exploring the film archives of the museum in making a new moving image work called ‘Tall Tales and Wonder Rooms’ 2022, for which she was nominated for the Jarman Film Award. Chandra was then appointed to the post of Senior Lecturer at Chelsea College of Arts (UAL), where she continued to develop the Empire and Place Research Network, expanding it from the Southwest to include Liverpool and other port city locations. Chandra has long established links with Liverpool, having her first solo show with commissioned work at the Bluecoat in 1997, working with the Artistic Director Bryan Biggs (now Director of Cultural Legacies). More recently, Chandra presented a paper on the emerging Empire and Place Research Network at the British Art Network Conference supported by the Mellon Foundation (Bluecoat Gallery sessions, Liverpool, 2022). Through the process of building the network via such forums as well as a series of roundtable, seminar and lecture events from 21-23 (supported by Knowledge Exchange Funding, UAL), she has developed further links with the International Slavery Museum (National Museums Liverpool) and the University of Liverpool, the University of Plymouth and other partners.