Professor Debanuj DasGupta was co-convener of the recently concluded art exhibition and symposium, Vichitra Desh/Queer Nation. The exhibition featured over 30 artists engaging with queer bodies and desires. Curated by Myna Mukherjee from Engendered Arts in New Delhi, the exhibition was like an assemblage of interdisciplinary art, theory and praxis that brought together visual and performance art, social science research, life-stories, and activist ephemera as a way of narrating themes of queer life-making, identity, bodies, desires at the margins of life and death. Murmurs and exchanges between friendship networks, the artist’s studio, and the academics desk fermenting a critical counter public that questions fantasies of nation building. A shape shifting, rather queer assemblage indeed!
The artists featured in the exhibition are working at the intersections of identity and life experience, genre and process. The art works represented a diverse cross-section of paintings and photographs, sculptures & videos, comic-book graphic art and new age digital media appropriations. Shattering mythologies of desire and intimacies, the works range from polished and seasoned to raw and sometimes even incomplete, exposed asthey are to the vulnerability of love and loss that is immediate and personal. They illuminate the complex landscape of gender, pleasure, fantasy and desire. Two of UCSB Feminist Studies faculties were featured in the exhibition.
There were two oil paintings based on Professor Matt Richardson’s recent novel Black Canvass. Alongside Richardson’s work the graphic novel being produced by Dr. DasGupta as a apart of their COVID-19 and Trans/Queer Life making project was also being showcased at the popular being a co-convener Prof. DasGupta Is in collaboration with University of California, Feminist Studies Department, at the iconic Visual Art Gallery, India Habitat Centre, the art and scholarship assembled at Vichitra Desh - Queer Nation gestures toward diverse life-worlds that multiply rhizomatically in the wake of deadly pandemics & politics in the contemporary times.
The symposium titled Qonclave featured over 22 thought leaders, fashion designer’s activists fighting to change LGBTQ recognition in India, policy makers and AI artists. The symposium was planned as a way for holding public dialog between queer theory and praxis, a sort of theory from flesh that helped to foster dissident joy at a time of unending wars.
Event details: Vichitra Desh – Queer Nation Dates: November 1–5 Venue:
Visual Art Gallery, India Habitat Centre. You can visit some of the media articles about this exhibition.
Link: Vichitra Desh – Queer Nation: A Masterclass in Queerness
Link: Vichitra Desh’ exhibition | Queer kinship in the capital
