Crossing Black Waters A Conversation Between Shaheen Merali, Bhajan Hunjan and Said Adrus

Bhajan Hunjan is a painter, printmaker and public artist. Hunjan was one of the five founding members of Panchayat. Her public art commissions, usually in stone, metal and concrete, are site specific and created through community consultation.

Hunjan was born in Nanyuki, Kenya and moved to Britain to study fine art at Reading University in 1975. Between 1979 and 1981 she completed a postgraduate course in the department of printmaking at the Slade School of Fine Art, alongside ceramics at Central School of Art and Design, London. Notable exhibitions that featured her work include Four Indian Women Artists (1981–82) which Hunjan curated with Chila Kumari Burman at the Indian Artists (UK) Gallery, Between Two Cultures at the Barbican Concourse Gallery, now known as The Curve (1982), Jagrati: Asian Women Artists at Citizens Gallery, Woolwich (1986) and Crossing Black Waters at City Gallery, Leicester and touring (1992).

Her solo shows include Horizon Gallery, London (1989), Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth (1989), Apna Arts, Nottingham (2000), Wallingford School of Art and Design (2005) and Bow Arts Courtyard, London (2015). Selected public artworks include Peepul Centre Floorscape, Leicester (2005), Leicester Town Square (2008) and Slough & St Paul’s Way, East London (2012). Recent projects include an installation in response to Stephen Turner’s Exbury Egg, London (2021, and a collaboration with Amina Khayyam Dance Company/Dance Woking and women’s groups in six cities across the UK (2020–21). Hunjan is currently artist in residence at Maria Lucia Cattani Projeto (2020–23) and was was nominated for the 2022–24 Max Mara Prize for Women.

Said Adrus works predominantly in film, printmaking, installation and on public art projects, including Sacred Spaces 2002 in Leicester, in collaboration with Bhajan Hunjan. He was born in Kampala, Uganda and studied at Stourbridge College of Technology and Art, and Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham. Adrus co-founded the Asian Artist Group (AAG) with Gurminder Sikand and Sardul Gill in the Midlands in 1984. He has exhibited throughout Europe and his work was presented at the second International Istanbul Triennale in 2013 as well as at Transforming the Crown at the Caribbean Cultural Center in New York (1997). Other exhibitions include Black People and the British Flag at Cornerhouse, Manchester (1992), Crossing Black Waters at City Gallery, Leicester and touring (1992), Transitions of Riches at Birmingham City Museum & Art Gallery, Birmingham (1993), Next We Change Earth at New Art Exchange, Nottingham (2008) and Recreating the Archive at Rassismusstammtisch, Bern (2011).

Shaheen Merali was born in Tanzania and lives in Britain. He is a curator, critic and artist of Asian heritage. Merali began his artistic practice in the 1980s, committing to social, political and personal narratives. As his practice evolved, he focused on his work as a curator, and has now moved to research and writing. Merali is Visiting Professor at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, and a PhD candidate at Coventry University, based at the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities (CAMC), Research Institute for Creative Cultures. His research is concerned with contemporary political Black arts practices that emerged in Asian and African diasporic cultures in the early 1980s and their relationship to curatorial and self-organisational formations in British arts. Merali is a member of the steering group The Role of Visual Arts Organisations in the British Black Arts Movement in the Midlands that received the AHRC Networking Grant (2021–23)

Merali curated the inaugural Uganda Pavilion, Radiance – They Dream in Time, for the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. The pavilion was presented the special mention award at the Golden Lion Ceremony. Merali co-curated Berlin Heist – or the enduring fascination of walled cities for the 2014 Mediations Biennale in Poznan, Poland. He also co-curated the 2006 Gwangju Biennale in Korea. Merali was the Head of the Department of Exhibition, Film and New Media at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin from 2003 to 2008, where he curated several exhibitions accompanied by publications, including The Black Atlantic: Travelling Cultures, Counter-Histories, Networked Identities (2004), Dreams and Trauma: Moving Images and the Promised Lands (2005) and Re-Imagining Asia: A Thousand Years of Separation (2008). Merali was a key lecturer at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London from 1995 to 2003 and a visiting lecturer and researcher at the University of Westminster from 1997 to 2003.

In 1988, Merali co-founded the Panchayat Arts Education Resource Unit in Old Spitalfields Market. The Unit engaged in an archiving practice, collecting ephemera, documents and publications pertaining to British political Black artists or artists of Asian and African descent. Their collection provided research material that illustrated the link between modern and contemporary art and activism in the UK and internationally. Since 2015 the Panchayat Collection has been donated to Tate Library and designated a special collection. It is housed at Tate Britain, London. Merali was the curatorial consultant on the Provisional Semantics project that took the Panchayat Collection at Tate as a case study to address ‘the challenges of representing multiple perspectives within an evolving digitised national collection’. His curatorial contribution was titled Panchayat-Horizon.