Artists Karl Ohiri and Mohini Chandra on family and communal histories

Artists Mohini Chandra and Karl Ohiri joined students from MA Curating the Art Museum at The Courtauld Institute of Art to discuss their work in relation to their exhibition Unquiet Moments: Capturing the Everyday. 

Mohini and Karl are artists whose work examines questions of cultural belonging, heritage, and migration. The online exhibiion Unquiet Moments: Capturing the Everyday includes two important works by these artists, Mohini's Album Pacifica and Karl’s How to Mend a Broken Heart, which are linked by their re-contextualisation of personal artefacts to explore wider complexities surrounding family and communal histories.

In this conversation both artists discuss the social function of photography in visualising individual and collective histories, as well as their appreciation for the physicality of the medium in a pre-digital era.

This talk was part of a series of events programmed around Unquiet Moments: Capturing the Everyday, an online exhibition of images and objects that capture the small wonders and disappointments, the intimate joys and tragedies, that shape our lives. As diaries of personal experience, portraits of families and communities, or traces of loss, these works of art call us to reflect upon the many ways in which we construct archives of our lives and memories.

The Courtauld and Somerset House collaborative digital programme is supported by