Ravelle Pillay

Ravelle Pillay (b.1993, Durban, South Africa) is a Johannesburg-based painter whose practice mines the haunting reverberations of history, extracted from archival photography and inherited memories. As a starting point, the artist collects family photographs stretching back generations alongside a broader archive of portrait and landscape photography as imperfect portals into the past. The process of meeting the canvas with unstable imagery is underpinned by an inevitable grappling with the legacies of colonialism and migration. Questions around agency to shape familial and national narratives, as well as access to power and land ownership, haunt Pillay’s polarised family history primarily as descendants of Indian indentured workers but also, more distantly, of British aristocrats, speaking to wider social issues in contemporary South Africa and beyond.