About Rowena Bahl

Rowena Bahl is a South Asian Kiwi multidisciplinary artist working across poetry, constructed image, performance and moving image.

Her work begins in the body. Language often arrives instinctively, before her conscious mind fully understands what it is saying, and becomes a way of making sense of love, family, culture, race, colonialism, desire, grief and trauma. From there, the process often moves in the opposite direction: into highly constructed visual worlds built through styling, performance, objects, environment and collaboration.

Much of Rowena's practice sits in the tension between those impulses: the instinctive and the controlled, the raw and the constructed, the body and the image. She is interested in consumption: what consumes us, what we consume, what we make ourselves consumable for, and how larger systems can be absorbed and internalised, influencing how we understand ourselves, one another and the world around us. Her work also asks what happens when we become conscious of that conditioning, and what it means to unlearn the beliefs, behaviours and ways of seeing that no longer serve us.

Rowena is in the early stages of developing her independent artistic practice. The Forgotten Sikh Women, created with photographer Gabriella Morton, was her first art project. It used contemporary portraiture and historical research to bring five Sikh women from history into the spotlight. The women included warriors, activists and community leaders whose contributions to social justice and gender equality have often been overlooked. The work was exhibited at Eyes On Fire Gallery in Auckland, with an extended collection shown at Jutta Gallery in New York City in 2024.

She is currently developing The Things That Consume Us, an ongoing body of poetry and constructed visual work, and Colonise Me, I Dare You, a multidisciplinary work bringing together poetry, somatic practice, performance, photography, moving image, sound and installation. The latter extends a question already present in her practice: what does the body know before language, and what else can it say when the body itself becomes a medium?

Rowena’s background spans creative direction, art direction, editorial, copywriting and content development, with more than a decade of experience in these fields. She spent five years at Destinations magazine, progressing from Art Director to Editor and helping shape both the visual and written direction of the publication. In 2018, she founded The Lovepost, a solution-focused platform tackling social and environmental issues, and remains its Lead Editor.

Alongside her artistic practice, Rowena continues to take on selected client work as a creative consultant, editor and content strategist.