Simranpreet Anand

Simranpreet Anand is an artist, curator, and cultural worker creating and working on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish peoples (Vancouver). She holds a BFA Honours in Visual Arts along with a second major in Psychology from the University of British Columbia. As the daughter of immigrant parents, raised in a diasporic Punjabi community, Anand’s childhood was filled with cross-cultural tension that cultivated an interest in the relationships between culture, familial history, and subjective experience. She considers it urgent to confront systemic racism and parallel settler- colonial structures in her work. Approaching these realities through their relationships to misunderstanding, failure, humour, boundaries and language as a way of bringing to the surface conversations that can be uncomfortable or remain buried. Her work is informed by her familial and community histories, often working with materials and concepts drawn from the histories of Punjabis and the Punjabi diaspora. Her research thus culminates in a mixture of cultural, textual, and material forms that are presented in ways that give rise to questions of identity, gender, racial politics, place, and space. Anand is committed to a socially engaged practice, having worked on community engagement and education projects with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, the Burrard Arts Foundation, documenta 14, the Hatch Art Gallery, and the Surrey Art Gallery. Alongside her studio practice, she works on writing projects for Rungh and is part of their Archive Creation Group. Anand is on the board at the Richmond Art Gallery and at 221A, and she is artist- and curator-in-residence at SFU Galleries for 2020–21.