Saans Lo (take breath) Supper Club

The supper club brings together Western Sydney University’s academics and students, and invited guest speakers alongside Western Sydney Creative’s exhibiting artists for a lively night of discussion centred on the key themes and issue presented in the current exhibition and aligned to research within the school, whilst enjoying a casual meal together.

The first Supper Club will be held on the evening of 10 April at the Margaret Whitlam Galleries, Building EZ, Parramatta South Campus, and aligns to the solo exhibition by Shivanjani Lal, Saans Lo (take breath). The supper club is a collaborative project developed by Western Sydney Creative and the School of Humanities and Communication Arts.
Keep an eye on our website and social media for updates. Event open to all.

@westernsydneyunicreative westernsydney.edu.au/wscreative 
The event will be catered by Fijian Indian Caterers Jhatpat Catering.

Arrive 5pm: Networking drinks and viewing of exhibition Saans Lo.

5:45pm: presentations begins

Confirmed Speakers

Opening remarks
Consul General of India - Dr. S. Janakiraman
Dr. S. Janakiraman is a career diplomat, joining the Indian Foreign Service in 2002.
He has served in various capacities in Diplomatic Missions in Brasilia, Lisbon, Yangon and Pretoria: served as Second Secretary Political, Commercial and Administration in Brasilia from 2004-2008; as First Secretary Political, Commercial, Consular and Administration in Lisbon from 2008-2011; and as Counsellor, headed the Commercial Wing in the Embassy of India in Yangon from 2013-2016. He has served as Deputy High Commissioner in Pretoria (South Africa) with concurrent accreditation to Kingdom of Lesotho, from 2016-2019.Before joining as Consul General of CGI, Sydney he served as Ambassador of India to the Republic of Cuba from July 2021 to November 2023.

Key note
Aarti Betigeri
Aarti Betigeri is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and former foreign correspondent, born in Melbourne to parents from Maharashtra and Karnataka. After an early career as a radio and television news presenter and producer with SBS and the ABC, she moved to India and lived in New Delhi for almost a decade. During her time in New Delhi, she reported across South Asia for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Time, the Christian Science Monitor, Public Radio International, and many others. Currently, she works as a journalist and advisor focusing on international relations. In 2024, her first book was published. Growing up Indian in Australia, is an anthology of first-person essays on the lived migrant experiences of Indian-Australians.

In conversation
Shivanjani Lal
Shivanjani Lal is a Fijian-Australian artist and curator whose work uses personal grief to account for ancestral loss.  She uses story-telling, objects and video to account for lost stories of Girmitiya (Indenture) from the Indian and Pacific oceans.

Lal grew up in Western Sydney, before study interstate and abroad.  Between 2017-18, Lal sought to globalise her practice with a prolonged stay in India, which led to periods of research in Nepal, Bangladesh and Fiji. She was the 2019 Create New South Wales Visual Arts Emerging Fellow, and the 2020 Georges Mora Fellow. In 2021 she graduated with distinction from Goldsmiths, University of London with a Masters in Artists Film and Moving Image. In 2023 she received the QAGOMA Vida Lahey Scholarship. Lal’s work has been exhibited across Australia, and internationally most recently in the Sharjah Biennial 16: to carry. Lal currently lives and works in Western Sydney.

Shivanjani Lal is the inaugural recipient of the Western Sydney Creative Artist Commission. The Western Sydney Creative Artist Commission is a new award supporting the development and creation of new art by Western Sydney based mid-career artists or artists’ collectives. The Commission is awarded to an artist or artists’ collectives for the purpose of producing an ambitious new work, presented as part of Western Sydney Creative’s cultural programming.

Manisha Anjali
Manisha Anjali is the author of Naag Mountain (Giramondo, 2024). Naag Mountain has been shortlisted for the Judith Calanthe Award for Poetry, highly commended at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and longlisted for the 2025 Stella Prize. Manisha was a recipient of BLINDSIDE’s Regional Arts & Research Residency at Mooramong, a Writer-in-Residence at Incendium Radical Library and a Hot Desk Fellow at The Wheeler Centre. She is the founder of Neptune, a research and documentation platform for dreams, visions and hallucinations.  Manisha is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne.

Panel discussion
Moderator- Dr Asha Chand
Dr Asha Chand is Associate Dean International, South Asia, and Senior Lecturer/Convener in Journalism at Western Sydney University. With 40 years of experience in academia, journalism, and newsroom management, she excels in high-level networking across industries and tertiary education. In 2023, she received India’s Nav Rattan (nine jewels) award in Delhi, recognizing her with eight other Non-Resident Indians  out of a diaspora of several million NRIs for her work in teaching, research and community engagement. Asha holds a PhD in Media, Culture, Migration, and Marriage and is a Senior Fellow of the UK’s Higher Education Academy. Honoured with the Mahatma Gandhi Pravasi Samman (2018) at the House of Commons in London and Hind Rattan (2019), in Delhi, she also won national awards for teaching excellence in Australia.

Panellist
Dipak Singh
Dipak Singh is a Sydney-based Indo- Fijian writer.  He started his writing journey through a doctoral program in Creative Writing at Deakin University. His research project was  Transforming Memory into Art: Stories from Fiji and the Indo-Fijian Diaspora. His creative fiction reconstructs the history of Naleba Village, in the Fiji Islands, from the period of indenture settlement to the military coups of 1987 and beyond.

Dipak Singh published his first book, Revisiting Fijian Memories: Naleba and Beyond in 2022. His second publication, Tilraji’s Life: Biography of a Subaltern Woman, is a research component of a life writing project completed at Western Sydney University towards a Doctor of Creative Arts qualification, and is the story of Dipak’s mother, Tilraji, who spent her childhood in Korovou, Bua, and adult life in Naleba in Vanua Levu.

Panellist
Suzanne Claridge
Suzanne Claridge is a writer and artist based on Gadigal land (Sydney, Australia). She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales, Art & Design. Her interdisciplinary practice-based research focuses on Girmitiya (indentured Indian labour) history, feminist postcolonial studies, archival poetics and experimental writing practices.