SHYAMA KUVER

Shyama Kuver’s artistic practice is inspired by her queer and Indo-Fijian identities, a deep love for speculative fiction, and growing up in pre-tech San Francisco. From a young age art was a place for exploration in her search for a sense of belonging. Without a solid national, racial, or ethnic identity, and a complicated (mis)understanding of motherland monoliths, her artistic style speaks to the multicultural, spiritual, and experiential contexts that have shaped her life and career.
 

Shyama is a community and self-taught artist. Her interdisciplinary practice is due to her experimentation with unconventional techniques, and styles, as well as by her interests in mysticism, temporality, and futurity. She explores notions of transcendence through a series of questions. What place does intergenerational trauma, connectedness, and (un)knowing have in our contemporary lives? What is power, what does it look like, and what is our scope of influence on its determination? What does it mean to be free, to be grounded, to know oneself? How can one’s own intimate struggle to build identity and a sense of belonging inform a larger landscape of dialogues, policies, and storytelling? Through her pursuit of these questions, Shyama builds small worlds where her figures, real and imagined, fill space alongside nature, planets, and colors symbolizing social dynamics and universes – past, present, and future.