Emery Prize 2020 | Pembroke JCR Art

Pembroke College JCR Art Collection are pleased to present the solo-exhibition of Emery Prize winner, Deshna Shah, in March 2022.
Deshna Shah is a multi-media artist based in Manchester and London, whose work seeks to address her complex relationship with location, culture and belonging.

Using the exhibition as a chance to share her continually developing, evolving and experimenting practice, the exhibition will invite visitors to explore and perhaps even decode a newly conceived sensory presentation of Shah's signature sculptural rice installations. Displayed alongside woodblock artworks, the exhibition is only part of the Kahani, meaning ‘story’ in Hindi, considering the artists and our own ongoing relationship with language, culture and heritage.

Shah uses her work to question the residual impacts of relocation, judgement and the unspoken especially within the South Asian diaspora. Living with dyslexia,

she combines Hindi, Gujarati, and English within her artwork, sometimes transformed into her 'Twilight Language'.

Between 2019-2021 the artist called out for letters written to loved ones about the unspoken issues between them. These were scanned and then each letter was manually converted into mandalas from English into the artist’s designed ‘Twilight Language’. Her enigmatic alphabet is used to narrate personal and social stories.
Her practice offers up a method of healing through participation and visual imagery. Her work fluidly meets at the crossroads of installation, dance, performance, filmmaking, new media, and critical theory. Deshna Shah has recently completed a BFA at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford and continues her artistic practice and research.

@deshnaart | www.thiseraart.com

Exhibition Opening Times

Friday 4 - Sunday 13 March 2022

Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays | 11.30am -4pm

Mondays - Thursdays | Closed, except for pre-arranged groups or visit

Meet the Artist: Special Evening Viewing

We will be hosting a special evening viewing of the exhibition with the chance to meet the Deshna Shah, the artist. Please check back here for details of date and time, and how to sign up to attend. This will be a free event, but we encourage people to sign up to help us manage numbers.

Group Visits
Please email jcr.artfund@pmb.ox.ac.uk if you wish to enquire about a private or group visit. We will endeavour to facilitate visits where possible, but we do have limited resources, so please do try to come during our public opening hours.

Game Theory

India vs England: national, cultural and internal conflict and celebration.

Sensory play, learning and Jain devotion - the resilient holy grain.
Basmati rice, lemon juice, blue food dye, 2020

Dear

Sharing my method of healing and hope, creating personal spaces for confession and
exploration of mental freedom.

Mediating costly letters to loved ones, an unsent archive of triggers.

Exposing hidden sexual violence repeated against British South Asian women.

Trauma of taboo, shame, preservation of cultural and religious identity.

Experiences externalised, ordered, transformed, represented, interpreted.

Memory remembered.

I am listening.

The Twilight Language

Between 2019-2021 the artist called out for letters written to loved ones about the unspoken issues between them. These were scanned and then each letter was manually converted into mandalas from English into the artist’s designed Twilight Language.
The artist is currently in the process of automating this conversion so that a space can be created online to express the unspoken issues between relations in a safe way.
2019 - ongoing

Rajma Chawal

Aromatic smells seep from the white box.
From opening my Indian tiffin tin isolated in my school changing room to cooking eternal maternal recipes in the Ruskin Project Space.

A personal and political reclamation of an institution through shared food and air: the
politics of smell - power, religion, nation, class, culture.

What does it mean to create, to share?
A karmic return of generosity.
Food = energy = power

The artist first draws with rice then creates Rajma Chawal (transl. kidney bean and rice) using the same rice for friends, tutors and the
general public to eat, using mother’s and grandmother’s recipe. Participants smell, taste and help cook the food.

Deshna Shah is a multi-media artist based in Manchester and London, whose work seeks to address her complex relationship to location, culture and belonging. Deshna uses her work to question the residual impacts of relocation, judgement and the unspoken especially within the South Asian diaspora. Living with dyslexia, she combines Hindi, Gujarati, and English within her artwork, sometimes transformed into her 'Twilight Language'. Her enigmatic alphabet is used to narrate personal and social stories. Her practice offers up a method of healing through participation and visual imagery. Her work fluidly meets at the crossroads of installation, dance, performance, filmmaking, new media, and critical theory. Deshna has recently completed a BFA at the Ruskin.

@deshnaart | www.thiseraart.com

The prize-winner was selected from the Ruskin School of Art BFA and MFA finalists. The judging panel, comprised of the Pembroke College JCR Art Collection Committee, made their decision based on the work which was submitted as part of their finals examination/portfolio. This year the committee were impressed with all the entries and we want thank all the Ruskin students who submitted their work.

You can see more of this years' Ruskin BFA and MFA Finalists' artwork here:

BFA Finalists | www.ruskindegreeshows.com/bfa-home

MFA Finalists | www.pixelmeat.co.uk