Winnipeg’s Divya Mehra wins 2022 Sobey Art Award

Divya Mehra, a Winnipeg artist whose research helped return a sacred sculpture to India, is the winner of the 2022 Sobey Art Award. Mehra, whose work comments on colonial cultural relationships and includes a version of the Taj Mahal rendered as a bouncy castle, was presented with the $100,000 prize in a ceremony in Ottawa Wednesday.

The four other shortlisted regional finalists – Halifax artist Tyshan Wright; Krystle Silverfox, a Vancouver artist who recently moved to Dawson City, Yukon; Montreal artist Stanley Février and Azza El Siddique representing Ontario – will all receive $25,000.

The Sobey Award, one of the largest art prizes in Canada, was founded in 2002 and is funded by the Sobey Art Foundation. It recognizes an emerging career with the finalists drawn from five regions across the country. It is organized by the National Gallery and judged by an independent jury of Canadian curators along with one international juror.

For the current exhibition of the shortlisted work at the National Gallery, Mehra was represented by her version of the Taj Mahal as well as works concerning the return of colonial treasures to India. In 2020, when Mehra was working at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina, she uncovered a small, misidentified sculpture in the gallery’s storage and, researching its origins, found out it was a figure of the goddess Annapurna hacked off a shrine on the Ganges River in 1913.

Her research led to the return of Annapurna to India in 2021; her artwork at the National Gallery includes a large photo mural showing the MacKenzie Gallery’s storage, where she has replaced the figure with a small bag of sand, purposefully antiqued. That is a reference to the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, in which Indiana Jones steals an idol and replaces it with a bag of sand of the same weight. In an installation on a similar theme, she writes to King Charles III suggesting he return the Koh-i-Noor diamond, taken by the British from a 13-year-old maharajah in 1849.

“The 2022 Sobey Art Award jury found Divya Mehra’s work resoundingly timely and sophisticated in addressing systems of cultural representation, production, and authority,” jury chair Jonathan Shaughnessy said in a statement. “Her approach is defined by its sharp wit, disarmingly playful allure, and attentiveness to language and aesthetics. Her most recent explorations turn towards issues of repatriation, ownership, and modes of cultural consumption that fundamentally implicate both institutions and their publics.”

Mehra was born in Winnipeg, and studied at the University of Manitoba before completing a Masters in Fine Art at Columbia University in New York.

“It’s an honour to be recognized and celebrated for your work in this way,” she said in a statement.

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