SHIRAZ BAYJOO

2023

Aug 25

Pran Kouraz (Take Courage), 2019
2k digital 16mm single channel video
14 minutes, 48 seconds
Originally Commissioned by Art Night London + Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts)

Riverside Park

Through his interdisciplinary art practice, Shiraz Bayjoo explores the socio-political and historical conditions integral to Mauritian cultural identity and the wider Indian Ocean region. His work traces the social and historical contexts of colonization in ocean spaces, which have been used for empire expansion, economic and cultural control, and resource extraction. Through experimental approaches and a decolonial lens, Bayjoo’s work looks at the darker histories of the stunning island archipelagos of Mauritius and Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, known more widely as a popular tropical locale in mainstream entertainment.

Pran Kouraz (Take Courage) explores notions of migration and displacement through a 16mm film made with students from Mission Grove Primary School, Walthamstow in London, UK. Bayjoo asked the children to consider their rights as young people alongside their own experiences of courage and overcoming adversity. Together they interrogated the myriad experiences of trans-migratory groups today, bringing together their understandings of displacement, loss, and courage and voicing the importance of personal agency in the world they will inherit.

Bayjoo places these questions against his own experience of flight and resistance from Mauritius, once known as the Maroon republic. The story of the enslaved Maroon becomes a wider metaphor for journeys of escape and overcoming and the transformation of self. The work asks, “What does it take to set flight?”

When speaking about a recent collaborative public art project in East London, UK, Bayjoo explains, “When you work with communities, you have to understand your social responsibility. The autonomous voice of the artist—that’s something that has long expired. In developing my practice, I’ve asked people to contemplate their own narrative, their family story, their community story, and how these fit with larger narratives of national identity. I’ve made collages with people to understand what symbols they would use to describe themselves, what fabricates a visual language, and how that filters into a wider community or collective identity. How does this community want to describe itself when it is really given the chance?” 1

Artist Biography

Shiraz Bayjoo is a Mauritius artist based in London, UK. His research-based multidisciplinary practice focuses on personal and public archives addressing cultural memory and postcolonial nationhood in a manner that challenges dominant cultural narratives. Bayjoo’s work has been exhibited internationally at Gropius Bau, Berlin; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Institute of International Visual Arts, London; New Art Exchange, Nottingham; 5th Edition Dhaka Art Summit; 14th Biennale of Sharjah; 13th Biennale of Dakar; and 21st Biennale of Sydney. Bayjoo is a recipient of the Gasworks Fellowship and the Arts Council of England, and was commissioned for Art Night, London 2019. He was an artist in residence at the Delfina Foundation in 2021 and has recently been awarded the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. In 2022 Bayjoo presented a solo exhibition at the Diaspora Pavilion for the 59th Venice Biennial and in 2023 he exhibited at the 15th edition of Sharjah Biennial.

1. Interview with Shiraz Bayjoo and Richard Martin, Director of Education and Public Programmes at Whitechapel Gallery, about his new public artwork in Globe Town, East London, July, 2023.