Artists in Conversation with Rajyashri Goody and Anya Paintsil

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Join Post-National Digital Pavilion artists Rajyashri Goody and Anya Paintsil in a collective conversation around making, patterns, lived experience, and diasporic strategies for belonging. Moderated by iniva’s curator, Beatriz Lobo, the discussion explores the thinking processes behind the commissions, as well as the artists’ collaborations with communities and everyday practices.

Three hybrid digital works, commissioned in partnership with the British Council, will be on view at the event, offering an opportunity to experience the artists’ work in person alongside a shared gathering space for ideas, reflections, and exchanges.

Taking place in a cosy long-table setting, the event creates a moment where the artists and participants convene, allowing the discussion to move between different perspectives and approaches. The dialogue builds on the project’s curatorial framework and pays attention to various repetitions, interruptions, and subtle shifts in rhythm that fluctuate within contemporary art and community contexts.

About the Artists

Anya Paintsil

Anya Paintsil is a Welsh and Ghanaian textile artist who lives and works in London and Glyn Ceiriog. Drawing inspiration from her childhood in North Wales, and her ancestral, Fante tradition of figurative textiles, Paintsil combines craft practices she was taught as a young child; rug making, appliqué and hand embroidery with afro hairstyling techniques to create large scale portraits. Paintsils’ figures explore the possibilities and politics of non representative depictions of the Black figure. 
 
Often mistaken as subversion of ‘primitivism’, Paintsil deliberately and consciously refuses to root her work in the European Fine Art Canon, Paintsil’s visual language finds its basis in traditional West African Crafts and Art – carvings, wood sculptures, masks – exchanging the hard materials for soft, in an interrogation of gendered labour, particularly the labour of working class women.

Rajyashri Goody

Rajyashri Goody was born in 1990 in Pune, India. She is currently based in Goa. Goody completed her BA in Sociology at Fergusson College in Pune in 2011, and an MA in Visual Anthropology at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester, UK in 2013. In 2023, she completed a two year residency at the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam.  

Her research interests include food and water politics, religion, literacy and literature, mobility and place-making in the context of caste-based violence and Dalit resistance in India. She works with found objects, paper pulp, clay, text, photographs, printmaking, and performance. 

Goody’s work has been presented at the Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa (2025, 2019); Bukhara Biennial (2025); Sao Paulo Bienal (2025); Sharjah Biennial (2025); Busan Biennale (2024); National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington DC (2024); Asia Now, Paris (2023); Jogja Fotografis Festival, Yogyakarta (2023); Recontres de Bamako (2023); Galleryske, New Delhi (2022); Breda Photo (2022); Savvy Contemporary, Berlin (2022); Goethe Institut, Pune and Mumbai (2025, 2021).