To mark the opening of the eleventh edition of the UK’s leading biennial and international contemporary art prize, ArtReview partners with Artes Mundi and catches up with the six international artists presenting their work across Wales from 24 October 2025 to 1 March 2026.
Anchored by a group exhibition at National Museum Cardiff that foregrounds ambitious new commissions and major loans, Artes Mundi 11 invites thematic resonances between practices shaped by displacement, memory and the environmental and emotional costs of political conflict, expanded through solo presentations at venues including Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Chapter in Cardiff, Glynn Vivian Art Gallery in Swansea and Mostyn in Llandudno. Platforming global perspectives on the human condition, Artes Mundi 11 continues the organisation’s commitment to socially engaged art. Among this year’s artists, Sancintya Mohini Simpson traces the inherited trauma of indenture through painting, video, and performance that weave ritual, poetry and matrilineal memory into acts of repair and remembrance. Simpson’s solo exhibitions include presentations at Milani Gallery, Brisbane (2022), Institute of Modern Art Belltower, Brisbane (2020) and 1ShanthiRoad Studio Gallery, Bangalore (2019). Her work will also be included in the upcoming group exhibition And Still I Rise at Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney.
ArtReview How do you help audiences connect with stories that come from your own background or community?
Sancintya Mohini Simpson When making or exhibiting my work I don’t necessarily consider the expectations of how audiences connect, or what stories and what people will be interested in or get something out of the artworks. We all carry histories in our bodies through epigenetic memory that we inherit, and our bodies remember through scent, sound and visuals. Through sharing stories or through sensory triggers there are different ways of connecting and I would hope that, no matter their background or community, people can see their own histories. This doesn’t always have to be a direct reflection, but all humans and all our ancestors have gone through experiences that have influenced our genetics and how we move through the world. I think my work takes on a life of its own once it is in a gallery or museum, and that having any expectation or control over how an audience would respond is not necessarily useful in approaching artmaking.
AR When you work with shared or inherited stories, how do you decide what to include and what to leave open?
SMS I use the different aspects of my practice to share different stories, and part of how I make work is an attempt to understand and explore these histories that we inherit and how this continues to get passed down – both positively and negatively through intergenerational trauma. What I find interesting is to try and understand this by acknowledging and addressing our role to heal past and future generations. So there is care that must be placed in what is revealed and what is not. With my poetry I can put much more personal detail in there while also keeping it hidden, as it’s layered and not overt; I can play with what gets hidden using language and multiple meanings. Whereas with a lot of the larger scale paintings viewers are looking not at my family’s specific stories but at the stories of my community – broader Indian indenture stories. There’s a care and love that needs to come with doing both, but if you’re representing a specific family member, how you’re going to depict them is very different. There is a distance with sharing indentured stories versus specifically talking about and naming my great grandfather or grandmother, for example.
It also depends on access, records, the archive, and if someone has passed or is currently alive. All of this is aligned to that thinking about time and place and when it’s appropriate to share. My research delves a lot into considering Glissant and opacity – this idea that not everything has to be translated or understood by everyone. I don’t need to translate what all the words I use mean because maybe you’ll get it by the way it makes your body feel, or how a word sounds when you say it aloud and the combination of that in the poem. We all have our own experiences and these histories that are complex – the way our world continues to be is just as complex – and we’re never going to fully understand everything and that is just a part of life and experience.
AR What would you like visitors to experience after spending time with your work?
SMS Similarly in line with what I discussed above is that I don’t necessarily approach making the work with audiences at the forefront of my thinking. I make the work for what I want to explore or what I need to process. You can’t control how audiences will receive it or what their emotional state might be when they are visiting or witnessing the work, you can only hope that they will find something to take away and reflect on or question. I hope that by talking about my family’s stories and these difficult, complicated and complex histories that often intersect and interweave with other people’s history, visitors know more and want to know more about these histories and about their own families’ stories.
AR Your large-scale paintings combine family photographs with abstraction to question how history is documented. How do you balance personal testimony and collective national memory when archives – both official and unofficial – can feel unstable or incomplete?
SMS Our bodies have memories or lessons from as far back as we can cognitively remember, along with our epigenetic memory of inherited histories. So sensory triggers like smell, sound and visuals can trigger these inherited memories. This isn’t secluded to a colonial past, this continues generally, and you see that in social trauma and mental health – the ability to regulate your nervous system and relax your body and feel safe. As I move through my practice, I am becoming more aware of not wanting to perpetuate colonial trauma. In more recent works I’m trying to take a more caring approach for myself and audiences because you don’t know what people are going through or what might be happening in their bodies, and I think we need to be much more sensitive about that.
I feel that desensitisation is common, because it’s not like a lot of these histories are all that long ago, for example apartheid in South Africa ended only in 1994 – these colonial pasts are still present, continuing to live in our bodies and in our families.
Sancintya Mohini Simpson will be showing work at Chapter and National Museum Cardiff, through 1 March 2026
