Photograph by Conner Singh VanderBeek
Simranpreet Anand
Simranpreet Anand is an artist, curator, and cultural worker creating and working on the unceded territories of the Kwantlen, Katzie, and Semiahmoo peoples (Surrey, BC) and the lands of the Anishinaabeg – The Three Fire Confederacy of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations, as well as the Wyandot Nation (Ann Arbor, MI). She holds a BFA Honours in Visual Arts along with a second major in Psychology from the University of British Columbia.
Her art practice interrogates the so-called neutral audience in multicultural society. To accomplish this, she uses materials —particularly textiles, language, performative gestures, and photographs —that resonate beyond the typical art gallery context. Anand’s works are meant for multiple audiences with different frames of cultural and/or artistic reference. Her practice is informed by familial and community histories, often engaging materials and concepts drawn from the histories of Punjab and the Punjabi diaspora and the ways in which they have been disrupted by colonialism and forced migration. The reclamation of cultural practice in her work interrogates colonial theft, cultural propaganda, and forces of global capitalism.
She has been awarded the William and Meredith Saunderson Prizes for Emerging Artists (2021) and the Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize (2023). Simranpreet is committed to a socially engaged practice, having worked on community engagement and education projects with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery, the Evergreen Cultural Centre, documenta 14, the Hatch Art Gallery, and the Surrey Art Gallery.
Contact me via email at simranpreet.a(at)gmail(dot)com.
Exhibition and Talk at PAMA
April 29, 2023This touring exhibition was developed by the Reach Gallery Museum where it previously premiered. It is readapted for its PAMA presentation and guest curated by Sajdeep Soomal.
The accompanying artist talk to this presentation will be on Saturday May 6, 2023 at the Peel Art Gallery Museum and Archives in Downtown Brampton. The event is from 2-4pm EST.
Winner of the Philip B. Lind Prize
January 26, 2023I had the extreme honour of receiving the Philip B. Lind prize for Emerging Artists. I am over the moon and appreciate all of the support and wonderful people who have led me to this!
Some press below:
https://www.surreynowleader.com/community/surrey-school-grad-wins-10k-emerging-artist-prize-from-the-polygon-gallery-in-north-vancouver/
https://www.createastir.ca/articles/simranpreet-anand-2023-lind-prize-polygon-gallery
https://www.createastir.ca/articles/lind-prize-exhibition-2022
https://www.nsnews.com/local-arts/north-vancouver-polygon-gallery-lind-prize-6115256
https://thepolygon.ca/news/press-release-lind-prize-2022-winner-announced/
Future of Work: Letters from the Land and Water
August 31, 2022I co-curated this exhibition at the Workers Art and Heritage Centre alongside the wonderful Srimoyee Mitra. This exhibition brings together works by Alvin Luong, Audie Murray, Jagdeep Raina and, Sindhu Thirumalaisamy, and probes the intersections between material culture, the natural environment, and economies that surround them. Their methodologies range between painting, video, sculpture, and embroidery. Each navigates the reality of an unstable living and working conditions that reveals the precarity of labour that has been propelled by global capitalism with local repercussions and fallout.
The culture of violence and volatility embedded in precarious work is echoed by the artists in the following ways: Thirumalaisamy’s experimental film The Lake and the Lake exposes the discrepancies between Bangalore’s technology boom-propelled luxury culture and the lives of those who live beyond the walls of the towering “Silicon Valley of India”. Raina’s archival references lay bare the working conditions that Punjabi farmers have endured in both Punjab and Canada in the age of mechanised farming. Both Raina and Murray’s intricate use of handiwork reflects the reclamation of practices that include beadwork, phulkari, and dhurrie that have been interrupted through colonial industrial violence. Murray’s work responds to the capitalist structure that has monetized Indigenous arts and crafts; her beading of gloves and other everyday objects are an act of reclamation and resistance. These haptic qualities continue to resonate throughout Luong’s work with a hand-tied life vest made of buoyant meatballs. Luong’s work invokes the freighters along the South China Sea and confronts us with the entangled and complex histories of food, migration, and labour.
The Future of Work: Letters to the Land and Water is part one of a three-part exhibition series presented by the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre (WAHC) in collaboration with the Art Gallery of Burlington that examines how the pandemic has affected labour markets, quality of life, and the future of work as we know it. Developed by the curatorial collective of Suzanne Carte (AGB), Srimoyee Mitra (Ann Arbour, MI), Simranpreet Anand (Surrey, BC) and Adrienne Huard (Winnipeg, MB), the three distinct exhibitions use interactive stations, film, photography, sculpture, and site-specific installations to open conversations on precarious labour, parallel economies, and labour futurisms.
Adorned at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria
June 11, 2022 I’m honoured to be in this group exhibition at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria alongside many incredible artists. Read about the exhibition below!
A show of visual bravura, this group exhibition presents ways and wills to be adorned and embellished with cultural traditions and a forecast of futurisms. Mavericks of design and radical thinking, these artists convey knowledge of material to weave, rethink, reshape, remix, collect, collage, splice and mend to produce original works of art in fashion. The fast fashion garment industry’s impact is significant – clothing waste and pollution are a reality, considering sustainably sourced and produced fashion is environmentally, socially and politically apropos. The works exhibited in Adorned will present style and identity beyond aesthetics and beauty, exploring cultural expressions, histories, futurisms and materiality.
The exhibition features works by Canadian artists; Dana Claxton, Karin Jones, Adeyemi Adegbesan, Sho Sho Esquiro, Atelier COĪN by Cameron Ray Lizotte, Meghann O’Brien, FarLee Mowat, Simranpreet Anand, Ay Lelum: The Good House of Design, and Simranpreet Anand. In addition, historical items from the AGGV collection are included.
Artist Talk Now Online!
April 14, 2022 Vasakhi deann lakh lakh vadayiaan! Conner Singh VanderBeek, Sajdeep Soomal and I held an artist talk that was supported by UFV and our exhibition at The Reach Art Gallery Museum. You can find the talk at this link.
Major Exhibition at The Reach Art Gallery Museum
January 28, 2022Abbotsford, BC – From January 28 to May 7, 2022, The Reach is proud to present ਸ਼ੀਸ਼ੇ ‘ਚ ਤਰੇੜ | sheeshe ‘ch thareṛ | a crack in the mirror. This exhibition is a survey of new work by artist Simranpreet Anand, whose work has been deeply influenced by her experiences as a Punjabi-Sikh. The exhibition is guest curated by Sajdeep Soomal, and it includes several works also made in collaboration with artist and scholar Conner Singh VanderBeek.
Anand’s practice, indebted to familial and cultural community, engages materials and concepts drawn from the histories of Punjab and its diasporas. The title of the exhibition, sheeshe ‘ch thareṛ, captures the fissures emerging from the artist’s ongoing encounters with matter and material culture in our globalized world. The show opens with ਬੰਦੇ ਚਸਮ ਦੀਦੰ ਫਨਾਇ |bande chasm deedn fanaai (SGGS 723), a body of works that takes the synthetic, plastic-laden material culture that surrounds contemporary Sikh institutions as its starting point. Parallel to this series are works that consider the fabric of everyday life, attending to its embodied histories and gendered contexts of labour.
For both Anand and The Reach Gallery Museum, it was essential for all the exhibition texts to be presented in both English and Punjabi. The Punjabi texts were written by the artist herself, but they are not a direct translation of the English. Rather, both original texts that are a result of conversations between Anand, VanderBeek and Soomal. Each text is context specific and includes unique concepts, ideas, and language. Furthermore, both Anand and The Reach recognize that a significant segment of the local Punjabi-Canadian community can speak and understand Punjabi but may not be able to read and write it. Therefore, each exhibition label also contains a QR code that connects to audio recordings of Anand reading the Punjabi content.
Winner of the William and Meredith Saunderson Prizes for Emerging Artists
September 29, 2021I have just been awarded the William and Meredith Saunderson Prizes for Emerging Artists! Alongside myself there are two other exceptional artists that have won this award, Dan Cardinal McCartney and Oreka James. The $5,000 prizes are intended to nurture emerging talent in the visual arts in Canada.
Dan is Dan Cardinal McCartney is an interdisciplinary artist and emerging curator who holds a degree from AUArts (2016) in Drawing. He is of Mikisew Cree, Dene (Chipewyan), Métis, and mixed settler family lines from Fort Chipewyan, and is a foster care survivor raised in the northern Boreal of Fort McMurray. As a Two Spirit, transgender artist, Dan sifts through patterns of intergenerational trauma, his personal connection between Indigenous diaspora and his gender dysphoria, and colonial impacts on his family.
His focus is on mixed media collage, painting, moving images, and performance. Dan's work has since been featured in Fix your hearts or die at the Alberta Gallery of Art; let’s talk about sex, bb at Agnes Etherington Arts Centre, and Off-Centre: Queer Contemporary Art in the Prairies at the Dunlop in Regina. He is currently the Assistant Director at Stride Gallery inso-called Calgary, AB.
Oreka James is an interdisciplinary artist currently living and working in Toronto. They have received their BFA in Drawing and Painting at the Ontario College of Art and Design University while studying Furniture Design.
To find out more, you can click here.
chashm-e-bulbul at Bayview Village ArtworxTO Pop Up Hub
September 21, 2021ਬੰਦੇ ਚਸਮ ਦੀਦੰ ਫਨਾਇ ॥ Bande chasm deedn fanaai || is a collaborative body of work between myself and Conner Singh VanderBeek that is now showing at Bayview Village ArtworxTO Pop Up Hub. This ongoing project uses the Sikh rumala sahib as a point of departure. These textiles are usually given as an offering at the gurdwara, sikh place of worship, and are cremated at the end of their lifecycle. For more information and images of this project please visit this page.
About the Exhibition: Phulkari is the ornately embroidered textiles from pre-colonial Punjab. This exhibition will observe the cultural significance of phulkari, textiles, and its associated oral traditions to probe our grandmother’s missing narratives from predominantly male recorded historical texts. Chashm translates to eyes. Our ancestor’s archive truths that they see and enact as bulbuls, which translates to nightingales, to sing knowledge for future generations. This weaves the thread of the past and future together. The grounding themes of the exhibition include the legacy of erasure of Sikh female bodies of work, and their relationship with Sikh spirituality and the natural world.
More information is available here.
Vancouver Special: Disorientations and Echo at the Vancouver Art Gallery
May 21, 2021I will have artwork exhibited as a part of the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Vancouver Special: Disorientations and Echo. The artwork being exhibited is ਦਸਤਾਰ ਬੰਨ੍ਹਣ ਲਈ ਬਲੂਪ੍ਰਿਪੰਟ (blueprints for tying a dastaar). You can find more information about this particular work here. The exhibition will be open from May 22, 2021 until January 2, 2021. There will be a public conversation about the work with Harleen Kaur, Gabrielle Moser, and Kulvinder Shergill on August 10th via Zoom. You can find more information regarding the program here.
Vancouver Special: Disorientations and Echo is organized by five co-curators: artist, curator and cultural critic Phanuel Antwi; artist, University of British Columbia assistant professor and curator Jeneen Frei Njootli; independent curator and author Jenn Jackson; artist and independent curator Christian Vistan; and Audain Curator of British Columbia Art, Grant Arnold. The exhibition will feature work by artists Jim Adams, Afuwa, Simranpreet Anand, Lacie Burning, Charles Campbell, Patrick Cruz with Francis Cruz and Qian Cheng, Gabi Dao with John Brennan and Elisa Ferrari, Chief Janice George and ‘Buddy’ Willard Joseph, Simon Grefiel, Whess Harman, James Harry and Lauren Brevner, Odera Igbokwe, Kwiigay iiwaans, Chief Floyd Joseph, Katie Kozak, Yaimel López Zaldívar, Betty Mulat and Zam Zam Warsame of NuZi Collective, Oraf, Manuel Axel Strain, Valérie d. Walker, MV Williams, Lam Wong, Marika St. Rose Yeo and Kenneth Yuen.
The Cinematic at WAAP
June 1, 2021The Cinematic Summer group salon will be held at Wil Aballe Art Projects from Sat, June 5 – Sat, July 3, 2021. This exhibition will feature collaborative work between myself and my collaborator Conner Singh VanderBeek. The title of the work in this exhibition is ਮੁਕਤਿ ਮਾਲ ਕਨਿਕ ਲਾਲ ਹੀਰਾ ਮਨ ਰੰਜਨ ਕੀ ਮਾਇਆ ॥ mukti maal kanik laal heera man ranjan kee maaiaa || To learn more about this work look here.
This summer salon exhibition includes the work of Simranpreet Anand + Conner Singh VanderBeek, Nabil Azab, Rebecca Bair, Steven Cottingham, Sunshine Frere, Kevin Holliday, Evann Siebens, Mark Verabioff, and Anna Zoria.