Divyaa Kumar

INFO

Name	Divyaa Kumar (she/her/they/them)
Born	1995
Country of Birth	Aotearoa
Place of Residence	Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
Ethnicities	Fijian-Indian, Pākehā
Artform	Literature, Visual arts
Decades Active	2010s, 2020s

ABOUT

Divyaa Kumar is a writer, poet and interdisciplinary artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Throughout their various creative practices, they explore identity, diaspora, ancestry, and the current socio-political landscape. In describing their appreciation of language, they explain, “You don’t need any tools to access or use language, you just need to exist around it, and you can bring it anywhere because it's part of your body.”

Growing up in Tāmaki Makaurau, Kumar came from a mixed-race home. Their father is Fijian-Indian, and their mother is New Zealand-born Pākehā of British descent. Their great-grandparents were indentured labourers in Fiji, and their grandfather worked in the sugar fields. Several projects Kumar has developed have centred narrative histories of their cultural heritage.

In 2017, they produced BITE ME, a series of collaborative workshops and events that aimed to discuss food and the politics around it through a lens of decolonisation. Part of this series was held alongside the exhibition REMEDIAL LEARNING (2017) at RM Gallery and Project Space. As part of this, Kumar led a workshop titled EAT MY SPICE: Cooking Chai Tea (2017), where they demonstrated how to make chai and provided a brief education on the drink, its ingredients, and its benefits. In aiming to decolonise tea, they discussed their origins in South Asian and Chinese cultures.

In their 2019 exhibition A Denial is not the Abolishment of Fact at Window Gallery, Kumar contemplated their lineage through text art and textiles. In the space, they suspended hand-painted canvas banners with phrases that read ‘A DENIAL IS NOT THE ABOLISHMENT OF FACT.’ and ‘MY ANCESTORS COULD NOT READ THIS TONGUE UNTIL MY ANCESTORS INVADED.’ In an interview with 95bFM’s Artbank programme about the show, they explained:

It was a way for me to engage with intergenerational trauma that exists. I was coming up with poems and statements to help me navigate through that and to help me start conversations with other people about their responsibilities in race politics. I started coming up with these little phrases, and now they’ve made their way into my art.

These ruminations on their bicultural heritage extend to their poetic writing. ‘A Modern Prometheus’ (2019), which was published in the online literary journal Starling, explores themes of lost and mixed languages, and biculturalism that is born out of the brutality of colonisation.

As a writer, Kumar regularly contributes to several online platforms, producing exhibition reviews and essays. The subjects they cover are varied and demonstrate Kumar’s assorted research areas. In 2020, during their Gus Fisher x Pantograph Punch Mini Writing Residency, they wrote ‘The People’s Communications Commission Report of Racist Broadcasting’. The report outlined a case for investigating breaches of broadcasting standards related to racial discrimination. Short poems written by Kumar were interwoven into the text, offering a contrast in writing style and rhythm, and providing breathing room in the midst of their extensive reporting.

Alongside their creative endeavours, Kumar works at Auckland Libraries. In 2023, they co-organised the Winter Mini-Poetry Fest with their fellow Auckland Libraries colleague Hebe Kearney.