Shiraz Bayjoo is a contemporary multidisciplinary artist who works with film, painting, photography, performance, and installation. Originally from Mauritius, his research-based practice focuses on personal and public archives addressing cultural memory and postcolonial nationhood in the Indian Ocean region. Bayjoo has exhibited with the Gropius Bau, Berlin; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Kunstal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Institute of International Visual Arts, London; New Art Exchange, Nottingham; 5th Edition Dhaka Art Summit; 14th Biennale of Sharjah; 13th Biennale of Dakar; and 21st Biennale of Sydney. Bayjoo is a recipient of the Gasworks Fellowship and the Arts Council of England, and was commissioned for Art Night, London 2019. He was an artist-in-residence at the Delfina Foundation in 2021, and was awarded the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. Bayjoo presented a solo exhibition at the Diaspora Pavilion for the 59th Venice Biennial in 2022, and the 15th edition of Sharjah Biennial.
His current research explores the intersection of colonial extraction and ecological erasure within enslaved and plantation landscapes. Bayjoo has worked with Indigenous groups in Australia and the U.S., observing similar narratives around ecological reparations and personal healing of communities. It is within this space that ideas around permaculture and its methodologies have become particularly pertinent within a decolonial discourse.
