Sabrina Tirvengadum
Studio Foto, 2025

Studio Foto by Sabrina Tirvengadum portrays a small girl resembling the artist’s sister, sat on a beach against a background that appears both realistic in part and like a studio backdrop. The work was inspired by Tirvengadum’s time in Mauritius, on which she reflected: “Mauritius is often described as a paradise island, which is why I found it so interesting that many Mauritians chose to take their portraits indoors, often in front of hand-painted backdrops of idyllic landscapes. Why recreate the outdoors inside when the real beauty was just outside with natural light all around?”

Tirvengadum’s work is driven by a desire to reconstruct the lost history of her Mauritian ancestors, a past deeply intertwined with the legacy of indentured labour in British-colonised Mauritius. Between the 1830s and the early 1900s nearly 500,000 people – including the artist’s great-grandmother – were brought from India to Mauritius to work under coercive conditions.

With very few images existing of her family prior to the 1960s, Tirvengadum has sought to reconstruct her family album by training an AI model on the photographs that do exist from her personal archive and wider extended family network, and prompting generative AI to visualise her family’s lost history. Her constructed images complicate the boundaries of truth, questioning what has been lost, hidden or never existed.

This work was developed during Tirvengadum’s participation in the Autograph x Light Work artist-in-residence and joins 10 other of her works which are now cared for as part of Autograph’s collection.