Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1964 Canvey Island, Essex, England

Other name/s: Dr Mohini Chandra

Biography

Photographer Mohini Chandra was born into a family of Indian heritage in Canvey Island, Essex, England, in 1964. Her personal history, with ancestors from India and an immediate family from Fiji, and being born in Britain but growing up in Australia, plays an important part in her work, grounding it in themes of identity, diaspora, and migration. During her childhood, Chandra also lived in Fiji and extensively travelled with her family throughout the Indian-Fijian diaspora. She often reflects on her family’s history as indentured labourers, transported by the British to Fiji’s sugar plantations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Chandra studied photography at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London where she also received a PhD, and then became an AHRC Research Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts from 2000 to 2003. Subsequently, she took up several research and teaching posts at different institutions, including Dartington Arts School (2022), Plymouth College of Art (2016-2023), Chelsea College of Art (2022-ongoing in 2024), and Falmouth University (2022-ongoing in 2024)

Chandra’s oeuvre is primarily photographic and explores the complexities of the global South Asian diaspora, emphasising themes of identity, belonging, culture, colonial histories, diaspora, memory, migration, and the challenges of establishing a place in the world as a migrant outsider. She focuses on themes surrounding diasporic Indian identity, especially within the shifting definitions of national identity in the UK and USA. Through photography, she engages with ethnographic and anthropological discourses and contemporary global imagery. Her art practice operates at the intersections of personal and collective histories. Chandra employs conceptual photography to critically examine migration, treating it not merely as a formative experience but as an ongoing state of being. This continuous sense of being ‘in transit’ or ‘inbetween’ defines her representation of the diasporic condition. Since the 1990s, Chandra has drawn on photographic practices from the 1960s and 70s to explore the persistent transitory nature of diasporic life.

Chandra regularly exhibits in the UK and internationally. Her 2021 solo exhibition Paradise Lost was centred around Plymouth’s shipwreck history, connecting it to themes of empire, slavery, and indenture. Chandra’s work explored the movement of people and objects in colonial contexts, highlighting her ancestors’ indenture journeys. The exhibition contrasted the idealised view of nautical expansion with the tragedy of shipwrecks. Between 2021 and 2022 she was part of an online and in-person exhibition at Autograph in London, Care, Contagion, Community which focused on the messy realities of the Covid-19 pandemic. It brought together different kinds of art, mainly photographs and videos, to show how the pandemic affected lives and what it meant to care and be part of a community during a crisis. In 2024, she was part of the widely discussed exhibition Entangled Pasts 1768-Now which explored the complex relationship between the historic Royal Academy of Arts in London and British colonialism, while highlighting the long-standing presence of black and Asian people in Britain’s history. The show unearthed the deep-seated ties between art and empire, revealing how colonialism shaped artistic practices and how Royal Academicians have grappled with its legacy. Through a wide range of artworks, the exhibition explored themes of power, resistance, and cultural exchange, with Chandra’s photocollages centred around the family’s diasporic sense of ‘in-between-ness’ and utopian ideals.

Throughout her career, Chandra has received numerous awards and commissions. She won First Prize at the South Bank Photo Show at the Royal Festival Hall in London in 1994. Her travel endeavours were supported by an Autograph, Arts Council funded Travel Award in 1998, followed by the London Arts Award in 1999. She received the British Council Visiting Artist Award in 2001 and was awarded an AHRC Creative and Performing Arts Research Fellowship at the Royal College of Art from 2000 to 2003. In 2004, Chandra secured a British Council Artists Travel Award, and in 2007, she was the recipient of the Arts Council of England Individual Artist Award. More recently, from 2019 to 2021, she received an Arts Council/National Lottery Project Grant for her project Paradise Lost. In 2020, she was recognised as one of the Hundred Heroines-Women in Photography. Mohini Chandra lives and works in Totnes, Devon, England. Her works are represented in UK public collections including the Arts Council of England, Autograph in London and the Arts Institute and the Arts University, both in Plymouth, Devon, while her oral history interview forms part of the British Library's sound archive, the Oral History of British Photography.

Related books

Dorothy C. Price et al., Entangled Pasts, 1768-now: Art, Colonialism and Change, exh. cat. (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2024)
Mohini Chandra and and Rebecca Empson, 'Tracing Histories', in Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright, eds., Between Art and Anthropology (London: Routledge, 2021), 103-108
Elizabeth Edwards, 'Travels in a new world–work around a diasporic theme by Mohini Chandra', in Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright, eds., Contemporary Art and Anthropology (London: Routledge, 2020), pp. 147-156
Mohini Chandra, 'Plane Views', Photography and Culture, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2015, pp. 107-117
David Campany, ed., Art and Photography (London: Phaidon Press, 2012)
Dorothy Rowe, Biography and Spatial Experience in Contemporary Diasporic Art in Britain (London: Routledge, 2007)
Swapna Tamhane, 'Mohini Chandra', Wasafiri, Vol. 17, No. 36, 2002, pp. 40-42
Mohini Chandra, 'Pacific Album: Vernacular Photography of the Fiji Indian Diaspora,' History of Photography, Vol. 24, No. 3, 2000, pp. 236-242

Public collections

Related organisations

Chelsea College of Art (Senior Lecturer)
Dartington Arts School (Lecturer)
Falmouth University (Module Leader )
Plymouth College of Art (Research Fellow and Program Leader )
Royal College of Art (Student and Research Fellow )

Selected exhibitions

Entangled Pasts 1768-Now (group show), Royal Academy, London (2024)
Care, Contagion, Community (group show), Autograph, online and onsite, London (2021-22)
Unquiet Moments: Capturing the Everyday (group show), Courtauld Institute of Art, London (2020)
Tall Tales and Wonder Rooms (solo exhibition), The Arts Institute/The Box, Plymouth (2021-22)
Paradise Lost (solo exhibition), MIRROR/Arts University Plymouth, Plymouth (2021)
Now! Now! In More than One Place (group show), Chelsea College of Arts, London (2016)
Confusion of Tongues: Art and the Limits of Language (group show), Courtauld Gallery, London (2016)
Mediations (group show), Ovada, Oxford (2007)
Album Pacifica (solo exhibition), Southeast Museum of Photography, Florida, USA (2001)
Travels in a New World (solo exhibition), Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool (1997)

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Mohini Chandra]

Ben Uri Research Unit

for the study and digital recording of the Jewish, Refugee and wide Immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900.

Mohini Chandra artist