Gallery Aferro’s 3rd Recipient of the Lynn and John Kearney Fellowship for Equity
Anjali Benjamin-Webb (b. 1997) is a Black American and Sri Lankan Tamil interdisciplinary visual artist working primarily in sculptural installation, video, text, and print. She received a BA in Political Science and Studio Art from Wellesley College in 2018. After graduating, she founded Palmyra Projects; a collaborative business practice dedicated to realizing the visionary ideas of disruptors, creators, and revolutionaries around the world.
Benjamin-Webb’s first major series, Of Tigers and Panthers (2018), marked the beginning of the artist’s use of sculptural installation to communicate directly with the senses, and with our ever-changing conceptions of time, space, and permanence. It is in this liminal space that the gravity of loss, absence, and grief is confronted.
Her second series, Bedtime Stories for Children of War (2019), was created during the artist’s time in Colombo when the 2019 Easter Bombings occurred. As old ghosts of the Sri Lankan Civil War stirred, Benjamin-Webb returned to the healing energy of natural materials, light, and space to honor the displaced, disappeared, and desecrated.
Benjamin-Webb is keenly aware of the necessity for collective mourning and of how preciously and precariously we are all positioned between life and death. Her work gathers the remnants of state enacted violence to disentangle our relationships to the deadening structures intent on destroying us.
Benjamin-Webb is currently a death doula-in-training and a Kearney Fellow at Gallery Aferro. Her newest body of work centers the language of the dying and the grief of those who mourn them.