juncture art prize
Linden is excited to announce Vittoria Di Stefano and Shivanjani Lal as the two inaugural winners of the JUNCTURE Art Prize.
The prize is an important part of Linden’s strategic plan to support mid-career artists, designed to support radical thinking,
conversations, and change, for both Artist and Audience. Each artist will receive a cash prize of $20,000 to help them develop
exciting new directions in their practices, culminating in an exhibition in 2024.
Vittoria will research, develop and produce a new sculptural installation that will explore the intersection of the domestic space, the
body and the psyche, expanding her exploration of the liminal nature of the domestic realm. The work will be site-responsive, engaging
with the history of Linden’s building by highlighting the existing interior architecture and creating works that respond to the
specificity of the rooms.
Shivanjani will work with collage, textile and printmaking as a methodology to explore Indentured Labour from Fiji and its mirrored
relationship of the South Sea Island community in Queensland. The work will investigate Australia’s role in the Pacific while also
considering the possibilities of futures for the lives impacted by this history.
Shivanjani Lal
Shivanjani Lal is a Fijian-Australian artist and curator whose work uses personal grief to account for ancestral loss. Recent works have used story-telling, objects and video to account for lost histories and explore narratives of indenture and migratory histories from the Indian and Pacific oceans.
Between 2017-18, she globalised her arts practice with a prolonged stay in India, which led to periods of research in Nepal, Bangladesh and Fiji. In 2019, Lal was the recipient of the Create New South Wales Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship, she was the 2020 Georges Mora Fellow and a Studio artist at Parramatta Artists' Studios. In 2021, she graduated with distinction from Goldsmiths, University of London with a Masters in Artists Film and Moving Image. In 2022, she received a Create NSW Visual Arts Commissioning grant to develop new work for The National to be shown at Campbelltown Arts Centre, in 2023. This year she will participate in the Carriageworks Clothing Store studio program from June, and is an artist participating in the City of Sydney’s Creative Live Work program for 2023-2024.
Lal’s work has been exhibited across Australia, and internationally in New Zealand, India, Barbados, France, Indonesia, the United Kingdom
and Italy.
+ Visit Lal's Websit
IMAGES > (top) Shivanjani Lal, Pani begets Pani, installation view, Murray Art Museum Albury, 2022. Photograph: Jeremy
Weihrauch. > (above) Artist and Curator Shivanjani Lal, 2020. Image courtesy of Parramatta Artists' Studios. Photograph:
Jacquie Manning.
Vittoria Di Stefano
Vittoria Di Stefano’s sculptural installation practice employs a methodology of generative material experimentation to explore themes around liminality, transformation and desire, with a particular emphasis on domestic space and intimate materiality. Through the employment of a diverse material palette, and often using modernist art, design or film as points of departure, the artist employs a feminist critique to investigate and challenge historical power structures and notions of value. The psychological and affective impacts of the material encounter are explored through a range of experiments in a variety of display contexts, offering new ways of contemplating and experiencing material realities.
Di Stefano completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at RMIT University in 2012. She was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy from
RMIT University in 2022. Selected solo shows have been held at Gertrude Contemporary (2022), Bus Projects (2019), c3 Art Space
(2018), Benalla Art Gallery (2017) and West Space (2016). She has been curated into group exhibitions at venues such as Bundoora Homestead
(2019), Bayside Gallery (2019), Town Hall Gallery (2017) and Notfair art fair (2017). She holds the position of Lecturer at RMIT, where she
currently lectures in Art History & Theory and in Sculptural Practice.
+ Visit Di Stefano’s Website
IMAGES > (top) Vittoria Di Stefano, The Palace at 4pm, installation view, 2022, Gertrude Contemporary. Photograph:
Christian Capurro. > (above) Portrait of Vittoria Di Stefano, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist.