Shaheen Merali was born of Indian heritage in Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika, British Empire (now Tanzania) in 1959. After moving to London at the age of 11, Merali studied sculpture at Gwent College of Education. He then became an artist, critic and curator, and through the Panchayat collective advocated for South Asian arts and archives in Britain.
Artist, writer, art critic and curator, Shaheen Merali was born in Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika, British Empire (now Tanzania) in 1959. Like other artists such as Zarina Bhimji, Symrath Patti, Alnoor Mitha and Said Adrus, Merali’s family arrived in Africa as part of the British colonial project to import South Asian labour to its East African possessions to assist with building railways and other industries at the turn of the twentieth century (Chambers, 2014). Merali moved with his family to London, England in 1970 aged 11, where he attended Arnos School and later completed his Foundation Course in Art and Design at Barnet College. He then attended Gwent College of Education (now Gwent College), Newport, studying sculpture between 1979 and 1982. After graduating he stayed in Newport for a further year, working with young adults on community-based projects focused on housing estates.
Merali emerged as an artist in the 1980s, and in these early years he preferred the use of batik, an Indonesian technique of cloth dyeing using wax-resist. Utilising what was conventionally seen as a ‘craft’ technique or ‘women’s work’ in a ‘fine art’ context, Merali challenged the gendered, Westernised and hierarchical assumptions of the medium while commenting on personal, social and political narratives. One of his batiks from the late 1980s was based on an old family photograph showing a group of Merali’s relatives as they were about to embark on their journey from India to Dar es Salaam. Placing an aeroplane overhead as a symbol of travel and upheaval, the piece spoke of the physical strains and turbulence caused by experiences of multiple migrations. In another batik, PG Tips: 80 Exploitation Flavour Flow Tea Bags (1989), he provocatively brought attention to the poverty and hardship suffered by tea pickers for the benefit of the British consumer (Chambers, 2014).
From the late 1980s, Merali began organising as well as showing his works in exhibitions. In early 1989, after meeting the curators and directors of the forthcoming 3rd Havana Biennale, he organised an exhibition of works of five Black and Asian artists in Britain drawn from a global diaspora. Works by Sonia Boyce, Allan de Souza, Pitika Ntuli and Keith Piper were shown alongside Merali’s own work at the Museu Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, Cuba, as well as at the Institute of Education, London. The experience augmented his interest in exhibition making and the possibility of archiving through curating. By this point, Merali had already co-founded the Panchayat collective with Bhajan Hunjan, Allan deSouza, Shanti Thomas and Patti, who in 1988 had all come together after conversations at the Slade to establish a collaborative and supportive network for South Asian arts practitioners in Britain (Patel and Merali, 2017). Meaning ‘group of five’, Panchayat took inspiration from the systems of Indian village governance, acting as a local council with educational, curatorial and archival objectives. Merali and deSouza administrated the Panchayat Arts Education Resource Unit, now the Panchayat Collection housed in the Tate Library (Tate website). With Panchayat Merali co-organised exhibitions including Crossing Black Waters (1992), which was held at City Gallery, Leicester and toured to Cartwright Hall, Bradford and Oldham Gallery and Museum. Solo shows from this time include Channels, Echoes, and Empty Chairs at Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham (1993), and Paradigms Lost, Travelling Gallery, Scotland (1995).
In 2000, the year that Panchayat won an open call for the Rich Mix Project, London (Patel and Merali, 2017), Merali co-curated Slow Release at London's Bishopsgate Goodsyard, which included a new commission by Edwina Fitzpatrick and installations by Dinh Q Le and Simryn Gill. At this time, Merali was lecturing at Central Saint Martin’s (now part of UAL) and the University of Westminster. In 2003 he became Head of Department of Exhibition, Film and New Media at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin, Germany, where he relocated until 2008, organising several large-scale exhibitions with accompanying publications. At HKW he also co-curated Re-Imagining Asia, One Thousand years of Separation, which toured to the New Art Gallery, Walsall. Between 2008-9 Merali was artistic director of Bodhi Art (Berlin, Mumbai, New York, and Singapore). Alongside his involvement with international exhibitions, Merali has also written extensively on the topics of art criticism, museum studies and the archive. In 2019, he was co-convenor of the symposium, 1989 This is Tomorrow: de-canonisation and decolonisation at the Courtauld Institute, London.
Shaheen Merali is based in London, England. He is a member of the advisory board of the Live Art Development Agency (London) and a PhD candidate at Coventry University. The Panchayat Collection, for which Merali is a curatorial consultant for the AHRC’s Towards a National Collection programme, is held in the UK public domain in Special Collections, Tate Library and Archive, London.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Shaheen Merali]
Publications related to [Shaheen Merali] in the Ben Uri Library