Mahaneela

0:11Hello everybody. Mahaneela, That's me. So it's kind of a long name my name is actually Mahaneela Chaudhary read but one of my goals for 2018 was that I wanted to just go as like a mononym like Prince Madonna Beyonce it's basically my inspiration.

0:35But I guess I think I should tell you a bit more about me and like how I got here.

0:40So I'm a photographer a direct a music manager creative consultant a DJ an event producer and a storyteller and for today I'm also a public speaker which is making me kind of my pants a little bit.

0:57But that's fine so let me just make sure this isn't too loud I dropped out of university in my second year to pursue a career in the creative industries although I wasn't really sure what that was I just didn't really want to do what I was doing and then things kind of developed on from there started in advertising and then moved my way up to working for a record label and over the last four years or so I've worked with some of my favourite artists at Excel and Young Turks from that career Award Prize winner sampler to Radiohead The XX and fka twigs just to name a few so my name Maha nila is actually made up it means great sapphire or great blue and as far as I know I think I'm the only person who's got it and because of this yeah I'm trying to go with the whole light mononym thing.

1:52So if you see my name and you see my surname just scrub it out if you can anyway here's me a prepubescent looking great almost a monobrow going on there and yeah from a lot of different places some half Indian and half Ghanaian a part was raised by my mom and my stepdad who's from Jamaica but I was also born and raised in the UK so there's a lot of flags that go of my Instagram bio and you know as well as being from India my mom was actually born and raised in Uganda so there's another additional flag in there that doesn't usually get a mention.

2:40So I like to think of myself as a person of the world I suppose and recently I've kind of come to the conclusion when talking about and doing interviews like I just did a feature with it's nice that recently talking about where I'm from and I realized that I'm not really supposed to be here so here's my immediate family on my Indian side my grandfather who's in the top right there he was a wildlife photographer and painter and my grandmother she was an author and an English literature professor so I think a lot of my creativity comes from them even though my granddad actually passed away when I was only 12 and so like I said I'm half Indian but the Indian side of my family were raised in Uganda and when my mom was just a teenager she had to escape a war-torn Uganda during a civil war and escaped the dictator Idi Amin and came to the UK on her way just to make matters worse she was involved in a really terrible car crash which meant that as doctors told her she wasn't going to be able to have children on my dad's side and this is my grandparents in Ghana in I think the 40s or 50s pretty long time ago.

4:09Basically they came to England because they were looking for about a life. There wasn't many opportunities back in Ghana for them and they wanted their kids to have a better education so because we don't have a lot of time we'll just fast forward to when I arrived which is the summer of 1993 and yeah my mum defied the doctors that told her she couldn't have kids and she had me. And then six years later she had my baby brother.

4:37So I go back to that realization of me feeling like I'm not supposed to be here when you think about it my very existence is the product of years of political unrest mass migration colonialism and civil war and there were so many decisions that could have been made that would have meant I wouldn't be here with you all today.

4:57But I am so shout out to my mom for the hot one I grew up in a little place called Roehampton in southwest London it was a predominantly white and middle-class area and I didn't really have any South Asian friends growing up it didn't really have much contact with the black side of my family either through my stepdad and although living in a home with multiple cultures might seem cool or exotic the dichotomy or even the trichotomy if that's a word of my identity was really confusing for me. And it built this sense of wanting to just do and be one thing within me I didn't really feel Indian enough I didn't look Indian I didn't feel African enough because I didn't have a connection to my gun inside I didn't feel black enough because I was born and raised in South West London. And sounded kind of posh to some of my friends and so whenever somebody asked me where.

5:56I was from they'd always get a different answer because I just wasn't sure and this theme of not knowing what I was and wanting to put myself into one box stayed with me right up until my adulthood and translated itself into my journey of discovery creatively for example it took me six years of photographing people before I could actually say I was a photographer which seems crazy because in those six years I did some really amazing work when I look back at it with some incredible people but once I did start calling myself a photographer and believed in myself a little bit more and realized that I didn't have to just be one thing I realized that I created a box and then I realized that. There isn't a box at all. And in fact that was something that came from fear of not belonging and feeling like you're not supposed to be here.

6:52So there's this idea of being a jack-of-all-trades and being a master of none so when I quit university I started working in advertising and I was a social media and manager and I thought I couldn't be a photographer at the same time because working in social media and advertising that requires you know critical thinking strategy and that's a totally different part of the brain to being creative and being an artist and it just seemed illogical to me that you could be a savvy strategist and also be an artist or think critically and creatively at the same time.

7:30But I've realized that I don't believe that anymore and I think this idea of being a jack of all trades and master of none is something that has actually perpetuated the idea that there's something negative about doing more than one thing and that in some way you kind of diminish one skill by taking on another.

7:51So the term jack of all trades master of none it originated over a hundred years ago it started I was just jack of all trades and then somebody added in master of none which is pretty shady and but then somebody else added something else in which I thought was pretty cool they were still better than a master of one which I think is like the best way to kind of look at it and yeah I've decided that I didn't want to keep like putting myself into this box so I decided I was going to smash the box and just go for all the things I wanted to do so over the last I don't know six years or so this is just like a little snapshot of some of my work.

8:33This is a lot of portraiture as you can tell my favorite color is obvious blue yellow that's Steve Lacey there on the right these are some other portraits from my in oka series this is again some more like fashion work and press imagery for artists this is my first digital cover I did which was shot in South Africa did the makeup I did the styling I did the art direction and as I've kind of developed I've realized that I've come to wear a lot of hats and that it's okay and it. Actually makes a lot of sense in the kind of world that we're living in now.

9:16This is some work I did portraiture Santha when I was onset of a documentary I've made called everything is recorded with my friends at child which was my first ever documentary film I did and that came out earlier this year.

9:31This is the first album cover I did for the name war who I now consequentially manage as well an A&R for so again another like crossing of disciplines more portraiture more yellow I'm obsessed with the other I also did like the makeup and stuff on this too. And I think that sense of like I used to really think of it as being DIY me doing these things but now I'm kind of like getting into the idea of oh no I'm actually I actually can do this.

10:07And that's just another skip and so finally after smashing the box and being able to call myself a photographer as well as all of the other things I mentioned at the beginning of this talk shot my first-ever magazine print cover for gal dome which is right here. And this happened literally in the morning after my first ever music video in the US which is my most recent project which was for a track with the rapper drum literally just happened to be in New York at the same time as the rest of the gal dem girls who were there for afropunk and everything just worked and here's a couple more behind the scenes kind of photos as well as obviously a mirror selfie because that's mandatory these days and yeah it was an amazing shoot because it was an in highly woman / non-binary POC group from the makeup artists to the art director styling everything. And I got to pick my own team and it was just an incredible empowering moment to have my first cover be for a print publication and for it to be for gal dem which is so dedicated towards uplifting women and non-binary folk like that.

11:26So yeah as I continue to establish myself more and do more of these like talkie things I've come to realize that the complexities of my heritage are often a talking point for people it's often something I get asked about and alongside with that so are the complexities of all the things I do and it's hard to explain how everything can fit into one people don't seem to grasp that an average day for me might begin with negotiating a fee for de neige and it might go on until I'm like writing a treatment for her.

12:03And then in the afternoon I might be taking pictures of somebody for a magazine and then interviewing them.

12:08And then by night I might be deejaying or running an event with cosy but this kind of fluidity of workflow seems unrealistic to a lot of people.

12:18And it's because we're constantly told just to master one thing to not distract ourselves from the main task at hand whatever it might be but I think that I'm testament to the fact that it doesn't have to be that way and yeah you might not be from loads of different countries or have a really complicated background or even know where you're from but there's one thing that remains the same for me and for everybody here and that is that everyone in this room is a really multifaceted talented diverse individual with quirks that make you you. And interest that are valid and should be explored I would never become a director from a photographer or a event producer or a manager or a DJ or a makeup artist or an art director if I didn't just try and I think smashing a box is something that we all need to do and yeah that's basically what I wanted to say thank you [Applause]