Kikau Street

2015 – 2016

My father was born in Kikau Street in Suva. The house he grew up in still stands, now empty, the family having migrated from Fiji, scattered in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Descendants of indentured labourers taken from India to the Pacific under colonial rule, they now join a highly globalised Indian diaspora.

In Kikau Street, I explore how Fiji’s complex nexus of colonial and postcolonial contradictions of migration, conflict, and identity also enjoys a double life as an idealised space within popular cultural mythology. For Indians in Fiji, the latter is embodied within domestic photography, memories of India as a cinematic dreamscape, and paradisiacal backdrops of commercial photographic studios owned by Indian-Fijian families. To explore these contradictions, I revisit my father’s homeground, the volcanic landscapes of Fiji, and former sugar growing areas where my Indian ancestors worked as indentured labourers while drawing upon varied image making histories: from the colonial and vernacular to the domestic and personal memory.

Mohini Chandra, a descendant of colonial Indian indentured labourers in Fiji, has an ongoing interest photographic narration and expression of diaspora. Her work on the Pacific, India, and Europe weaves the dislocation of migration under colonial conditions into contemporary experiences of globalisation.

Since graduating from the Royal College of Art in London, Mohini has exhibited at Asia Society and Museum (New York), Courtauld Institute (London), NGBK (Berlin), Whitechapel Art Gallery (London), Centre for Contemporary Photography (Melbourne), Johannesburg Biennale, and Photo Kathmandu (Nepal). Her work is held by international collections including Arts Council Collection UK and has been featured in major survey publications such as Phaidon’s Art and Photography by David Campany.