20/20 meet the artists: Bindi Vora
- Written byKatie Moss
- Published date 17 August 2023
In June, UAL announced the twelve emerging and mid-career artists in the second of 2 cohorts for 20/20: a national commissioning and network project directly investing in the careers of a new generation of ethnically diverse artists.
20/20 was launched in November 2021 by UAL Decolonising Arts Institute, working with a network of 20 UK public collections, museum and gallery partners, and with funding from Freelands Foundation, Arts Council England’s National Lottery Project Grants Programme and UAL.
We caught up with Bindi Vora about being selected for the second cohort of artists for 20/20. Her residency is taking place at Ulster Museum, National Museums, NI.
Tell us about your artistic work, discipline & background
"I am an interdisciplinary photographic artist of Kenyan-Indian heritage, associate lecturer in photography at London College of Communication and Curator at Autograph. As an artist, I am interested in how ideas of resistance and resilience are influenced by our everyday surroundings. My work combines collage, linguistic motifs, and analogue processes – working with an archive of found images procured over the last decade. I am interested in how these materials can be reused and recycled to create new narratives but can also be traced back to other works too, like interconnected tissues."
Why did you apply for the 20/20 project?
"The 20/20 Project and in particular the National Museums NI’s collection really spoke to me – the collection and political tensions within the context of the collection is of particular interest to me, its unique position between colonialities resonates. As a second-generation Ugandan-Asian whose parents were exiled and migrated to East Africa before finally settling in the UK in the early 1980s, my ancestral heritage has often been spoken about through the trauma of displacement and loss but also through the rebuilding of community and kinship. These ideas have deeply influenced my practice, which weaves personal narratives of migration with collective notions of alienation, focusing on the potentials of language."
What conversations, thoughts or feelings do you hope to encourage amongst your audiences during your residency?
"To be empowered to undertake such work within the Ulster Museum, a space that has openly engaged with the potential fault lines within the collection, that isn’t simply about erasing her/histories but working in collaboration with artists like me, to have challenging and transparent conversations, is an imperative action. Understanding of the intersections between language, culture, and their inherent power dynamics, to explore the ways in which language has been used to oppress and marginalise communities in order to create work that challenges these issues. For me the notion of residency becomes a personal negotiation, a way of re/visiting place, to interrogate the unruly and create thought-provoking conversations about the role of language in museum practice, that perhaps may speak to a wider local diasporic community, considering this intervention as a starting point and not an end."
Follow Bindi Vora on social media:
Instagram: @bindi_vora