Arpita Shah’s photographic and film practice explores ideas around home, belonging and shifting cultural identities. Her work is informed by her own experiences of being born in Gujarat, India, then later growing up across Saudi Arabia, Ireland and the Middle East, before her family settled in Eastbourne.
Arpita’s work has been shown internationally including in Canada, India, United Arab Emirates and across the UK. She was the recipient of the 2019 Light Work and Autograph ABP Artist in Residence programme in Syracuse, New York, and her work is held at the National Galleries of Scotland, The Hyman Collection and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. She is also member of the board of trustees for Street Level Photoworks in Glasgow.
Her ongoing work Nalini includes portraits of women in her family alongside photographed objects, places and plants that are infused with meaning, symbolism and memory. The series reflects personal and universal themes, connecting Arpita’s own family history with stories of mass migration in the South Asian diaspora.
Nalini focuses on your mother, grandmother and you, to explore female, diasporic histories through an intimate lens. How did this work come about?
I’ve always been interested in intergenerational relationships between mothers, daughters and grandmothers. Nalini is my grandmother’s name, and it means ‘lotus flower’ in Sanskrit. She grew up in East Africa, where my family owned a dairy farm in the 1930s. At that time both India and Kenya were colonised by the British, and travelling from India to East Africa was a journey many Gujarati Indians had made. Then in World War II, my family moved back to India.
In 2015 I was visiting India with my mother. My grandmother was in hospital, in a coma after falling and hitting her head. In this moment I realised there were so many questions I thought I would have time to ask. When she woke up after three weeks, I asked her, ‘where were you?!’ – we had a very playful relationship, and she replied: ‘I dreamt I was floating in the ocean between India and Kenya, and I was just floating, and I didn’t know which way I was going.’
This conjured up really powerful and beautiful imagery for me as an artist. Of course I had to make something about this.
My grandmother had this life in East Africa that I knew a little bit about, but they moved back to India before my mum was born, and I’d left India when I was three. I chose to work on this series using photography, because in images you can time travel. When you come from a migrant history, where your family is scattered and everything’s in fragments, you hear stories through different relatives. There are objects you’ve seen once that have since disappeared, and so through Nalini I wanted to piece it all together in one place through photographs.
Can you tell me about some of the symbols in the work, for example the flowers and plants that appear in several images?
Flowers have a long association with women in many cultures. In Indian mythology, art and culture, women have often been depicted with flowers, or compared to flowers.
In my work, flowers are a metaphor for the female experience and for uprootedness: for the feeling of being lifted from your roots and being placed somewhere else, or the feeling of constantly floating in between two cultures.
I reference lotus flowers a lot in my series Nalini because in Hindu mythology the lotus is linked to the womb, the female life cycle and rebirth. Flowers are so symbolic, they grow and bloom and wilt, just like objects that have crumbled through time, or photographs that have creased as they have been passed down through generations, or like skin that has slowly aged through time.
Also having grown up in India and Saudi Arabia with memories of wild bougainvilleas, lotus flowers, hibiscus, marigolds and tulsi plants – these are all flowers that remind me of home and connect me to my family and my ancestors.
Your work has a sense of longing and dislocation but also rootedness, and plants are a potent symbol of these feelings. How was gardening or cultivating plants significant for your ancestors?
My family owned farms in Kenya and India so I grew up with stories of my great grandmother, my gran and mum tending to mango plants, Java plums and tamarind. They would dry turmeric leaves under the afternoon sun. My great grandmother always had aloe plants, jasmines, champa and hibiscus. So I grew up with these stories of women collectively growing together and sleeping side by side on the land.
Such stories fed into my practice, and how I think about how one connects with their culture and heritage through the land, nature and through community. Having moved around a lot, I’ve never felt part of a strong community of Asian women, so it’s something that I try to create and explore in my work.
Also, going to back to the cultivating of significant plants, when we lived in Saudi Arabia, my father planted an Indian rose garden. The smell of roses reminds him of India and of his family farm and this made me think a lot about the power of taste and smell and tactility, and how a certain scent or texture a flower can transport you to a particular memory.
Photographs like the open passport of your great-grandmother with a flower laid on it, and the hand tinted image of your grandmother, garlanded with petals, feel shrine-like. How is the idea of offerings important in your work?
Nalini is essentially a love letter to all the women in my family. And growing up in a Hindu home, on special occasions I would witness my mum, gran or aunt decorate fresh flowers around photographs of our ancestors, such as my great aunts and my great grandmother. It was a way of respecting them, honouring them and remembering them and that’s the core of what this body of work is really all about.
The open passport image of my great grandmother has a bougainvillea flower that I hand picked at the site of my family’s dairy farm in Nairobi, Kenya. This image symbolises my grandmother’s migration between East Africa and India and that of other South Asians, but it was also personal because it documented my own journey to East Africa for the first time.
Bougainvilleas originated in Brazil, but they were planted by the British in countries that they had colonised. Although they didn’t originate in East Africa or India, they’re very much part of my family history, they’re just as displaced as we are, and tangled in this history of colonialism and mass migration.
Your current solo exhibition at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (BMAG) features a series titled Modern Muse, which focuses on South Asian female identity through portraiture and conversation with your sitters. How did this work develop?
When I was studying photography in the early 2000s I didn’t see women like my mum or gran, or South Asian women being celebrated in museums and galleries. That’s one of the reasons I became a photographer, so I could celebrate South Asian women and represent their varied narratives through the act of a brown woman photographing other brown women.
When Modern Muse was commissioned by Grain projects in Birmingham in 2019, I knew that I wanted to make work with South Asian women in the Midlands. I grew up in places that weren’t predominantly South Asian, so always felt like an outsider. So for this series, I was really interested in what it’s like to grow up in a place that has such vibrant South Asian community and how that shapes your identity.
My niece was six at the time of this project and I recall telling her that I wanted to make some really inspiring portraits of brown women, so she and her sister can go to a museum and gallery and think, ‘I want to be like her’, because I never saw that kind of representation growing up in the 1990s.
Modern Muse was recently acquired by Birmingham Museum’s Trust. So I think the legacy of the work goes beyond me as an artist. It’s about these women, their families and histories, and how that’s going to be permanently part of Birmingham’s history.
One of the most striking things about the portraits is the sense of confidence and poise that the sitters appear to possess as they gaze directly at the camera. To what extent are portraits like these collaborations with the sitter?
I’ve always been interested in the historical representations of women, particularly in Mughal paintings where – just like in Western art – women were often depicted as muses and portrayed as passive. They’re always looking away, and are painted sensually, wearing transparent clothing, and painted through the Male Gaze. But, when we return to the true meaning of ‘muse’ which originates in Greek mythology, its origins are sisterhood, creativity and power. So, through this series, I wanted to reclaim and reframe the meaning of Muse and celebrate this through a creative community of inspiring young South Asian women.
Because my portraits often refer to paintings, they are staged to some extent, but agency is really important in my work. When I work collaboratively with women, families or different communities, my photographs are always accompanied by sound or text. Because I’m very aware of the power of photography and the responsibility I have to be honest about the stories and people I photograph.
In Modern Muse the collaboration is through this dialogue and the clothing that the women chose to wear to represent their identities. Each portrait has accompanying text based on informal conversations we had, about being asked where you come from, about your family history, and your relationship to your cultural heritage.
I photographed the series with a medium format film camera, and this was the first body of work, where I placed my camera lower and tilted my lens up, to really elevate the status of these women and their gazes, and celebrate their powerful words.
You were recently awarded a Freelands Foundation Artists’ Bursary. How will you use the award?
The past few years have been really intense for me, I’m a mum of twin boy toddlers, and last year I was involved in nine shows. So, I’m really grateful for this bursary because it will allow me to slow down, do some research, reflect on the past couple of years, and just reset a little bit. I plan to research and visit some exhibitions in London, meet with organisations that I’ve been wanting to connect with for a while, and also experiment some new ideas with my medium and large format cameras – without the pressure of having to produce finished work.
What do you have coming up?
I’m currently part of two group exhibitions: Say No! Art, activism and feminist refusal at Wardlaw Museum in St Andrews; and also Celebrating 40 Years of Scotland’s Photography Collection at Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh. My solo exhibition Modern Muse continues at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery until until Summer 2025.
In April, I’m part of group show at The Royal Photographic Society, Bristol, as part of the nationwide GAIA Foundation Campaign We Feed The UK. This project paired photographers and poets together with regenerative farmers and urban growers. Working with Photo Brighton Fringe who co-commissioned the project and poet Zena Edwards, I photographed two incredible black-led female organisations in North London: Black Rootz and Go Grow With Love. They’re both multi-generational growing communities that empower black women to learn about land and growing your own food.
It was a really inspiring experience spending time with these communities, very fast paced compared to making Nalini. But, such a wonderful insight into women collectively growing, sharing and learning together, and the passing of ancestral knowledge to future generations.
And finally: how does being a member of a-n support your practice?
I became aware of a-n a few years after I graduated and found your Exhibitions Payment Guide. And I remember reading an article on writing proposals for funding, and that advice has always stayed with me.
a-n is important because it advocates fair pay, and nurtures an inclusive, diverse community of artists, facilitators, educators and curators. The interviews and the writing give you insights into other practices. Being an artist can be quite lonely sometimes, so it’s really lovely to be part of community that celebrates artists.
Top image: Arpita Shah, 2025. Courtesy: the artist
