“My earliest encounters with history shape my work: the bedtime stories my dad told me as a child, describing places and lives I could not see, lives I had no physical reference for.”
Shana Ellappa is a South African multidisciplinary artist and researcher based in Cape Town. Her practice sits at the intersection of visual art, life writing, and memory work, reclaiming histories that have been marginalised or silenced. As a South African woman of Indian heritage, she is drawn to the stories of her ancestors: indentured labourers whose lives were often reduced to numbers and ship lists, leaving few traces in official archives. Through her work, she engages personal and collective memory as a counter-archive, asserting that storytelling – whether visual, textual, or embodied – is a political act capable of challenging systemic inequality and catalysing social change.
Life writing informs her work, enabling her to translate embodied knowledge, oral histories, and familial memory into visual form. Her practice is tethered to her cultural heritage through three recurring objects – the case, the sewing machine, and the coal stove – which materialise as text, fabric, and stitching; charcoal, clay, and fire. Each carries its own language of memory and transformation.
The symbolism in her work emerges from deeper histories uncovered through tracing her ancestors’ indenture numbers in archival records: histories of caste, duty, and livelihood that reveal the resilience, creativity, and survival of those
who came before her.
Ellappa’s practice aligns with decolonial methodologies, creating alternative archives of identity and belonging that emphasise lived experience, communal memory, and storytelling as acts of resistance and healing. Through her works, she invites audiences to engage with histories that cannot be fully recovered but can be felt, imagined, and honoured. Her work contributes to expanding the visibility and experiences of South African women artists of Indian heritage in national and global conversations on art, memory, and resistance.
Life writing informs her work, enabling her to translate embodied knowledge, oral histories, and familial memory into visual form. Her practice is tethered to her cultural heritage through three recurring objects – the case, the sewing machine, and the coal stove – which materialise as text, fabric, and stitching; charcoal, clay, and fire. Each carries its own language of memory and transformation.
The symbolism in her work emerges from deeper histories uncovered through tracing her ancestors’ indenture numbers in archival records: histories of caste, duty, and livelihood that reveal the resilience, creativity, and survival of those
who came before her.
Ellappa’s practice aligns with decolonial methodologies, creating alternative archives of identity and belonging that emphasise lived experience, communal memory, and storytelling as acts of resistance and healing. Through her works, she invites audiences to engage with histories that cannot be fully recovered but can be felt, imagined, and honoured. Her work contributes to expanding the visibility and experiences of South African women artists of Indian heritage in national and global conversations on art, memory, and resistance.