At The Table with Sancintya Mohini Simpson

Presented in partnership with British Council, Artes Mundi presents the fourth of six free At The Table talks series for AM11.

Sancintya Mohini Simpson will be in conversation with Becca Voelcker a writer and historian, artist and curator Shivanjani Lal and curator, writer and researcher Hajra Haider Karrar.

The At The Table series brings together the voices of the six AM11 artists alongside those of international curators, artists, historians, thinkers and writers in a series of roundtable discussions. The talks will centre on themes and ideas present in the artist’s work and the interwoven relationship between histories and practices, locally to internationally.

Imagining we are sitting around a table sharing conversation and exchanging ideas, this event is a chance to hear different concerns and perspectives while getting to know the artist and their work.

The talk will be interpreted in BSL and live captions will be provided.

Sancintya Mohini Simpson (b. 1991) is a descendant of indentured labourers sent from India to work on colonial sugar plantations in South Africa. Her work navigates the complexities of migration, memory, and trauma— addressing gaps and silences within the colonial archive. Her work spans painting, video, poetry, and performance, reflecting on her maternal lineage through narratives and rituals. Simpson has had recent solo exhibitions at Milani Gallery, Institute of Modern Art Belltower, Brisbane and 1ShanthiRoad Studio Gallery, Bangalore. Group exhibitions include the 2023 TarraWarra Biennial and the 2022 Busan Biennale. Simpson’s poetry is published in various journals, and her work is held in major collections, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Jameel, Dubai; KADIST, Paris and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; she is represented by Milani Gallery, Brisbane.

Becca Voelcker is a writer and historian of art, film, and visual culture. Much of her work considers senses of place. Originally from Wales, and then living in Tokyo as a young adult, Becca later moved to the USA to complete a PhD at Harvard University. She is currently a Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2024 Becca was named a BBC New Generation Thinker. Her first book, Land Cinema in an Age of Extraction, is a cross-cultural history of eco-political cinema. The book launched alongside a BBC Radio programme and a curated film season at the Barbican.

Shivanjani Lal is a Fijian-Australian artist and curator whose work uses personal grief to account for ancestral loss. Recent works have used story-telling, objects and video to account for lost stories of Girmitiya (Indenture) stories from the Indian and Pacific oceans centring women’s perspectives. Truth-telling and monument making has become a focal point of my research in an attempt to decipher what is lost and the possibilities of futures. In 2021 she graduated with distinction from Goldsmiths, University of London with a Masters in Artists Film and Moving Image. Her work has been exhibited across Australia, and internationally.

Hajra Haider Karrar is a curator and writer invested in articulating questions that destabilize and reconfigure colonial and capital paradigms underlying knowledge production through ancestral and affective epistemes. She is curator at SAVVY Contemporary: The Laboratory of Form-Ideas, Berlin, and the guest curator of Rhythm Alliances, Colomboscope Edition 9, 2026. Karrar’s curatorial and collaborative projects have been featured at cultural institutions and biennales including Tate Research Centre: Asia, London 2018; Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow 2014; Centre Pompidou, Paris 2017; Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester 2016-2017; Yarat Contemporary Art Space, Baku 2012; Akademie der Künst, Berlin; Lahore Biennale 02, IV Moscow Biennale for Young Art, 5thInternational Biennale of Contemporary Art Azerbaijan, and Kochi – Muziris Biennale 2022.