Drawing from personal and collective histories, Shiv Lalgi explores the layered terrains of identity and the role of the quiet, often invisible process of survival, adaptation and becoming. By asserting value in stillness and the poetics of the unsaid, each composition characterised by a softly subdued but vivid palette, becomes an invitation to examine intimacies, infatuations and desires, centralising the brown female labouring body as a site of storytelling. Occupied in psychological landscapes, figures seeks liminal spaces, those tender thresholds between light and shadow, waking and dreaming, presence and absence. Traces of the visual lexicon established in Indo-Persian and Mughal miniature paintings linger in Lalgi's paintings, repurposed through the imitation of linear quality and two dimensional flatness - the only form of Art she grew up looking at. By reinventing iconic forms from South Asian imagery infused with contemporary relevance, painting becomes a bridge between Eastern and Western Art history, challenging modes of representation and hierarchies in low and high art

Shiv Lalgi (b. 2001, London) is a British Gujarati Painter, recently graduated from the Slade school of Fine Art. Her decolonial practice seeks to be a necessary means to reclaim and reconcile. Lalgi's work has been featured in group exhibitions across London (UCL Art Musuem, The crypt, Kunstraum, Queer Circle, Metre Sqaured) and Ahmedabad Ni Gufa, India