Shamil Balram

Multidisciplinary artist, writer and sensitive thinker. Shamil’s practice looks at ways in which cultural identities and inherited colonial structures transmit to the body and psyche by challenging systems of assimilation through material, engaging with complicated and violent histories that shape our contemporary landscape in post-colonial/post-apartheid social and political worlds. Shamil’s work expands in ways that are able to make linkages and form solidarity with memory and trauma.

His research addresses questions of wayward lives, fugitivity, rapture, informal knowledge practices, and oral narratives and pays attention to inherited trauma. Through sound, text, performance of archives (imagined embodied) and object-based installations.

Shamil exhibited in many group exhibitions and project spaces including Rapid Response Restitution at Lagos Photo Festival (2020), Peer, SMAC Gallery Cape Town
(2017). Recipient of the Jules Kramer Arts Award 2020. He also received the Anya Millman Scholarship, awarded for outstanding practical work in Fine Arts (2020).