In this live podcast recording, Gem Fletcher speaks with Bindi Vora who utilses collage, mark making and the appropriative use of image and text to question how ideas of resistance and resilience are shaped by our surroundings, histories and lived experiences. The conversation will focus on two projects Vora is presenting at Peckham 24, Mountain of Salt and Unravelling.
Mountain of Salt is an expansive series of 371 works composed of found images, appropriated text and digital shape collages, initially conceptualised as a human response to the Covid-19 pandemic. As the country was plunged into lockdown, Vora began to collect fragments of text and spoken word from politicians, journalists or members of the public accrued across a range of sources; government briefings, Twitter commentary and even placards from the Black Lives Matter protests. The resulting juxtapositions feel uncanny—familiar yet elusive—like a half-remembered dream.
In an evolving new series Unravelling, Vora attempts to locate herself in a culture where colonial systems have sought to flatten and simplify her heritage. The work gently unravels Vora’s family history of migration traversing three continents, over the course of a century to explore the interplay of archive and myth, unveiling the complexities and tensions inherent in diasporic experiences.
Bindi Vora is an interdisciplinary artist of Kenyan-Indian heritage, associate lecturer at LCC and senior curator at Autograph, London. She is interested in how ideas of resistance and resilience are shaped by our surroundings, histories and lived experiences. Her practice often combines linguistics and an archive of personal and found photographs procured over the last decade to draw on the intersections between language, culture and their inherent power dynamics.
Gem Fletcher is a writer and host of The Messy Truth podcast, a series of candid conversations that unpack the ways in which images shape our world and what it means to be a photographer today.
The Messy Truth X Peckham 24 is a series of live podcast recordings hosted at this year's festival engaging some of photography’s most dynamic talent in candid conversations about their recent work and wider practice.
Book your ticket here.