Shamil Balram

AVA Exhibition: As Natural As Daylight: Plants, Memory & The Edge of Belonging (Group Show) 20.11.25 - 24.01.26

Incorporating sculpture, installation, text, performance, and sonic work. Shamil Balram’s practice engages with the concepts of land and labour. Land as a repository of memory. His practice further invites a de-familiarisation with the everyday and questions the affective and lived dimensions of systems and histories of labour. His work explores a range of languages, where material is not simply its physical composition. These materials importantly explore the properties of remembering, geographic connections and synchronicities within personal history, and the forces of migration, labour, farming, and orientation.

Working with materials such as earth, plaster, stone, charcoal, and found objects. Shamil carefully selects materiality chosen for its conceptual, symbolic, and narratively located resonances. Carrying traces of sites and memories. Driven by conceptual models for thinking beyond conventional notions of resistance through the use of material and storytelling. Conceptually coded around a politics of rethinking how Black lived experiences are imagined, questioning societal relations that are produced through these structures of labour, his work examines our orientation and contests different practices of labour and knowledge, both in the study of lived experience and the effects of emotions, through a decolonial Black studies framework.

Shamil has featured in group exhibitions including We Never Speak Alone: Land Labour Material, The Point of Order in Johannesburg, South Africa (2024), LAND//SITES OF (BE)LONGING, Latitudes Johannesburg, South Africa (2023), Lagos Photo Festival, Rapid Response Restitution. Virtual Home Museum Lagos, Nigeria (2020) and Peer, SMAC Gallery, Cape Town (2017).

Instagram: @shamil.balram

exhibition

Association for Visual Arts .