Divya Mehra

Divya Mehra was born in 1981 in Winnipeg, Canada, the second youngest of four children. She received her BFA (Honors) in Visual Arts from the University of Manitoba School of Art in Winnipeg in 2005[3] and her MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University School of the Arts in New York in 2008.[4]

Divya Mehra, Dangerous Women (Blaze of Glory), 2017, digital image. This work is the inaugural Art+Feminism Call to Action Art Commission.

Known for her meticulous attention to the interaction of form, medium and site, Divya Mehra's work deals with her diasporic experiences and historical narratives. She incorporates found artifacts and readymade objects as active signifiers of resistance or as reminders of the difficult realities of displacement, loss, neutrality and oppression. Mehra works in a multitude of forms, including sculpture, print, drawing, artist books, installation, advertising, performance, video and film.[5] She often uses humour as an entry point to her work, explaining, "Humour everyone can understand ... creates space because it's really the most accessible thing and so that becomes the pathway into my work."[6] Mehra encourages viewers to consider their often-uncomfortable reactions to difficult questions about race(ism) and representation. She asks, "How can I have a conversation about something as complex as race and representation? If you...joke about it, I think it creates a space for a lot of people to enter and then think about what they're laughing at."[7] By pairing research into popular culture — including comics and social media — with her experience as an artist within the Indian diaspora, she creates highly provocative yet humorous works that disarm viewers while challenging stereotypes and contributing to conversations about diversity, colonialism and the impacts of racism. Mehra's artistic output is a form of resistance — both to being consumed by and to satisfying the audience's needs and desires.[8][9]

Mehra is well known in part for her text-based works. One of her first of such works, Currently Fashionable, was created in 2009 and shown as a part of her exhibition, You have to tell Them, i’m not a Racist. That exhibition was first presented in 2012 at La Maison des artistes visuels francophones, in St. Boniface, Manitoba, and again in 2017 at Georgia Scherman Projects in Toronto. The text works appear in English, Hindi and French. “While at first appearing to be a blank, white canvas, as one moves closer the white letters begin to emerge from the white background, confronting the viewer with the phrase ‘people of color.’ Deliberately blending in with the walls of the exhibition space, Currently Fashionable deftly unsettles assumptions about the neutrality of such spaces, and exposes the underrepresentation of people of colour both on and within the walls of art institutions. While the phrase ‘people of color’ is ‘currently fashionable,’ terms that are at one time culturally accepted may in time be considered outdated, and oftentimes derogatory. Mehra points to the absurdity of this particular phrase by arranging the words in the screenprint so that the acronym ‘LOL’ — meaning ‘laughing out loud’ — may be read vertically.”[10] In her 2017 exhibition essay “Abolish, She Said,” Kendra Place sums up Mehra's institutional critique: “Personnel changes are necessary and urgent. Where inclusion is suspect, however, Divya is holding out for something more substantial than what can sometimes be tokenizing diversity or spectacular multiculturalism, such that white people are no longer the hegemonic curatorial, editorial, and directorial influence, and people of colour are not reduced to a fleeting trend.”

In 2012 Mehra was one of ten artists commissioned by MTV Music Television, MoMA PS1, and Creative Time to reimagine “Art Breaks” — a video series on MTV in the 1980s that first showcased video work by Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. Art Breaks 2012 featured videos by Sema Bekirovic, Cody Critcheloe, Andrew Kuo, Mads Lynnerup, Tala Madani, Divya Mehra, Rashaad Newsome, Jani Ruscica, Mickalene Thomas, and Guido van der Werve.[11] In Mehra's contribution to the series, entitled On Tragedy: Did you hear the one about the Indian?, she “riffs on [Richard] Prince’s 1985 video, in which he buys a vanilla cone from an ice cream truck outside the Guggenheim Museum and proclaims himself ‘one of the best-kept secrets in the art world’.”[12] Modeled in the same way as the Prince video, the audience watches Mehra pay and wait for a soft ice cream cone she has ordered from an ice cream vendor parked outside the Guggenheim. “When she finally gets it, the swirled ice cream is stacked so high that even before she utters a single word, it topples to the sidewalk with an evocative splat. It’s almost slapstick.”[13]

Mehra was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2017. Created in 2002, the Sobey Art Award “has fostered the careers of exceptional Canadian artists and the diverse conversations engendered by their work.” Mehra created new work for both the exhibition and her Sobey Art Award profile video, which functioned as a visual montage of her phone's personal archive.[14] In her collection of five works for the exhibition, Mehra explores racism, loss and identity. The National Gallery of Canada writes: “Symbolizing the failure of the American dream, a crushed gold vintage Jaguar dominates her section of the exhibition. The car is joined by personal objects like the brass base of a statue of the deity Ganesh. The rest of the statue was sawed from the base and stolen from her family’s restaurant.”[15]

In 2018, Mehra was commissioned to create the Spring 2018 Canadian Art Magazine cover for the "Dirty Words" issue. For the cover image Mehra recreated the set of the popular Canadian sketch comedy show, You Can't Do That On Television, and reimagined one of the infamous recurring moments when a character on set is being drenched with slime whenever they say “I don’t know.” In her recreation, Mehra “rebels, shielding herself from the slime — dumped on her by white, male arms — with an umbrella. There is a stoic, ironic expression on her face.”[16] That same issue also features an artist folio by Mehra — entitled “Tone” — that explores the complexity of South Asian diasporic experiences.

Mehra was also the subject of a 2018 episode of the CBC Arts docu-series, In The Making. The series “is an immersive journey inside the creative process” that “follows host Sean O'Neill across the country and around the world alongside some of Canada's leading artists as they bring new work to life and face pivotal moments of risk and reward.”[17] In the series finale, Mehra travels to India to begin work on a new inflatable work — a bouncy castle Taj Mahal — that was then exhibited for the first time as a special project for Vision Exchange: Perspectives From India to Canada, which began its cross-Canada tour in September 2018.[18] “Mehra’s installation utilizes the Taj Mahal as a point of departure, considering how it has become an overused and problematic cultural signifier representing South Asian people throughout the diaspora.”[19] The National Gallery of Canada acquired Mehra's work, which will become a part of the gallery's collection after the exhibition tour wraps up.

Mehra's work has been exhibited, screened and commissioned nationally and internationally, including with Creative Time, MoMA PS1, The Queens Museum of Art, Paul Robeson Galleries at Rutgers University, MASS MoCA, Banff Centre,[20] CCA Wattis Institute, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at the University of Toronto Art Centre, Art Gallery of Ontario,[21] Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia,[22] Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, CBC Ideas, Night Gallery, Art Metropole, Essex Flowers, Bielefelder Kunstverein, The Images Festival, The Beijing 798 Biennale, Latitude 28 in Delhi, Scrap Metal Gallery, Common Field, Artspeak,[23] Consulate General of India in New York, Royal Ontario Museum, CBC Arts, Georgia Scherman Projects, Kamloops Art Gallery, and the Embassy of Canada in Washington.

Asian Brain Trust was founded in 2014 by writer and organizer, Amy Fung, visual artist, Divya Mehra and writer and curator Kim Nguyen as an arts research collective.[24] Together they have lectured and presented in international conferences and settings (Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Amsterdam, New York, Halifax, Vancouver, Toronto) on the topic of race, power, violence and performance in contemporary visual arts. ABT's largest project to date would have been the June 2020 multi-day gathering, MIXED COMPANY that was to speak to the systematic oppression and exclusion of racialized arts workers in Canada and beyond. MIXED COMPANY would have included acclaimed leaders and innovators in their respective practices as internationally recognized artists to distinguished scholars: Katherine McKittrick, Lisa Lowe, Tania Willard, Erin Christovale, Anuradha Vikram, Daina Warren, Yaniya Lee, Patrick Cruz, Sampada Aranke, Cathy Mattes, Ajay Kurian, Lori Blondeau, Alok Vaid-Menon, Eunsong Kim, Peter Morin, Curtis Santiago, Native Art Department (Maria Hupfield and Jason Lujan) and Jessica Lynne. ABT had to cancel MIXED COMPANY due to the 2020 pandemic, but has begun working on Bad Society.[25]

• Wanda Koop Research Fund, 2020[26]
• Sobey Art Award, shortlist, Prairies and the North region, 2017[27][28]
• Glenfiddich Art Award, shortlist, 2015
• Manitoba Arts Council, Major Arts Grant, 2014

• Divya Mehra. Tone. Canadian Art Magazine, 2018.[29]
• Divya Mehra. Pouring Water on a Drowning Man. Winnipeg: As We Try and Sleep Press, 2014.[30][31]
• Divya Mehra. Quit, India. Vancouver: Artspeak & Winnipeg: PLATFORM, 2013.[32][33]

• Jen Zoratti. “Artist tackles colonialism with wit, Inflatable installation acquired by National Gallery of Canada,” Winnipeg Free Press, August 31, 2019.[34]
• Yaniya Lee. "Tactics and Strategies of Racialized Artists: Some Notes on How to Circumvent the Art World’s Terms of Inclusion," ArtsEverywhere/Musagetes, November 29, 2018.[35]
• Marissa Largo. “Jamelie Hassan and Divya Mehra: Cultural Currency and Canada 150,” Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, Issue 4, March 4, 2018.[36]
• Mark Mann. “White Like Me: Encountering Divya Mehra’s You have to tell Them, i’m not a Racist.,” Momus, October 21, 2017.[37]
• Amy Fung. “Dearest Divya,” in conjunction with the exhibition You have to tell Them, i’m not a Racist., Georgia Scherman Projects, Toronto, 2017.
• Kendra Place. “Abolish, She Said,” in conjunction with the exhibition You have to tell Them, i’m not a Racist., Georgia Scherman Projects, Toronto, 2017.
• Angela Henderson & Solomon Nagler. “Review: It’s Gonna Rain,” Border Crossings Magazine, Issue 141, March 2017.[38]
• Denise Markonish. “Oh, Canada: Contemporary Art from North North America,” in conjunction with the exhibition, Oh, Canada, at MASS MoCA, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.

• Official website
• Divya Mehra on Vimeo