Shiv Shankar

Shiv Shankar (b. Gaya, Bihar) is a visual artist whose practice interrogates the intersections of memory, violence, displacement, and structural erasure within Bihar's contested socio-political landscape. He holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda (2022), and a Master of Fine Arts from the Department of Art, Media and Performance, Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence (2025). Shankar's work emerges from lived experiences of caste-based violence and forced migration. Displaced from Jehanabad to Gaya during adolescence due to escalating conflict, his practice examines how landscapes function as repositories of silenced histories, sites where trauma is simultaneously inscribed and erased. Through painting, installation, moving image, and performative interventions, he creates visual testimonies that challenge institutional failures to preserve marginalized narratives. His methodology engages experimental cartography, employing negative space, voids, and spectral absences to visualize what remains unspoken. Drawing from rural geographies, death rituals, and quotidian tensions, Shankar's work constructs unstable fields of visibility where documentation itself becomes a contested political act. His practice questions dominant cartographies and archival structures, positioning art as counter-memory, a refusal against bureaucratic forgetfulness. Informed by critical frameworks on witnessing (Sontag, Derrida) and landscape as power (Mitchell), Shankar's practice operates at the threshold of presence and disappearance. His installations often incorporate ephemeral materials and acts of repetition, interrogating how images hold trauma and negotiate silence. Recent works include site-specific installations in Jehanabad and a sustained inquiry into the 1997 Laxmanpur Bathe massacre, examining judicial complicity in erasing testimonies of caste violence. Shankar's practice continues as an ongoing negotiation with structures of power, reclaiming narratives through visual resistance and embodied remembrance. 

Academics

B.V.A Major in Painting with Minor in Graphics (2018-2022), Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University of Baroda, Vadodara

M.V.A. Department of Art, Media and Performance (2023 - 2025), Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, Delhi-NCR