The Dissent of Play: Lotahs in the Museum (original) (raw)
Related papers
Terrifying Performances: Black, Brown, Queer Borrowings in Loins of Punjab Presents
Journal of Asian American Studies, 2016
Otto and B.D.G., a black and desi gay couple in the film Loins of Punjab Presents (Manish Acharya, 2007), are an exceptional representation of interracial desire in South Asian diasporic cultural production. Beyond the novelty of their representation, they use a variety of black and South Asian performance styles to critique normative and disciplinary systems that surround them. This essay explores the unconventional ways through which Otto and B.D.G.’s intimacies are depicted, and analyzes the performance styles they use to express critical perspectives on racism, homophobia, and Islamophobia. I argue that Otto and B.D.G.’s performances offer alternative ways to think through contemporary conversations around cultural appropriation and interracial desire in ways that decenter whiteness or a white desiring subject. However, I also observe how their critical deployments of hypermasculinity potentially skew public conversations about racialized violence.
Solidarity - Rasa/Autobiography - Abhinaya: South Asian Tactics for Performing Queerness
This article examines the work of D’Lo, a Sri Lankan-gay-hip-hop performance artist, and the Post Natyam Collective, a transnational coalition that develops critical and creative approaches to South Asian dance. The works utilize two strategies for performing queerness in relation to South Asian cultural practices: (1) autobiographic performance art rooted in identity politics and (2) the South Asian technique of abhinaya. These strategies use different modes of identification and audience-performer relationships. Autobiographical solo performance creates solidarity through shared identity or alliances between performer and audience. Abhinaya evokes pleasure and sensuality in multiple, ambiguous ways towards the goal of evoking rasa, ideally the audience’s experience of emotional-spiritual transcendence. We investigate tactical cross-overs between the strategies of autobiography and abhinaya in D’Lo’s and Post Natyam’s work: how do they interact, where might they exclude each other, and what kind of performance of queerness emerges through their interplay?
Art Asia Pacific, 2017
>>This year, pressing issues of our time—migration, gender, sexuality, race and religion—were tackled head-on at two events in New York: the exhibition “Lucid Dreams and Distant Visions: South Asian Art in the Diaspora” at Asia Society Museum, and the two-day conference “Fatal Love: Where Are We Now?” at the Asia Society Museum and Queens Museum. Nineteen South-Asian-American artists explored the narratives of recent immigrants, second-generation Americans and transnational artists working in and around South Asia and America in “Lucid Dreams and Distant Visions.” The exhibition was a microcosm of what defines the American experience. Here, numerous artworks examined the notion of home through intertwined personal and political histories within the framework of systemically biased and oppressive structures of authority. Artist-activist Jaishri Abichandani, who conceived of “Lucid Dreams and Distant Visions,” co-curated this exhibition with Tan Boon Hui (vice president for Global Arts and Cultural Programs and director of Asia Society Museum) and Lawrence-Minh Davis (curator at Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center [APAC]). <<
Telling global stories, one at a time: the politics and poetics of exhibiting Asian art
World Art , 2015
Compared with other ‘peripheral’ art, exhibitions of Asian art in the United States remain depoliticized and unscrutinized. This essay examines recent exhibitions against the long trajectory of collecting, classifying and displaying Asian art in the US, and argues that, despite their efforts to venture beyond conventional museology, art institutions today still tend to prioritize poetics over politics, ‘tradition’ over modernity, homogeneity over heterogeneity. Such lingering Orientalism can be attributed to reasons ranging from logistical difficulties to conflicted interests, but above all to a lack of historicity: the intentional or habitual shunning of contextual complexities, the inclusion of which may deprive the artworks – and their hosts – of their pretense to neutrality, transcendence and aura. The critical approaches taken by contemporary Asian American artists and curators, on the other hand, are also fraught with contradictions and ambivalence, but they point to more historicized, nuanced and illuminating ways to display Asian art. Contemplating the unexplored directions and hidden connotations of Asian and Asian American art exhibitions in recent years, this essay contends that restoring and explicating historical specificity is crucial for building and propagating meaningful accounts of world art history, in which issues such as the appropriation of as well as resistance to modernity, the migration of objects, personae and techniques, and the experiences of the global diaspora can serve as governing themes and guiding principles, replacing a taxonomy based on nationality, ‘culture’ or chronology. Those accounts of world art history are destined to be fragmentary, yet only through such stories can we envision substantive (if ephemeral connectivity)
Georgina Maddox examines, through the lens of personal experience during the making of a short film, 'Bombay Longing', with filmmaker Shalini Kantayya , at the phenomenon of art and activism through the medium of independent short films. This paper is not shaped as a systematic and linear exposition of a well-worked out argument; rather, it carries marks of the fragmentary nature and episodic structure of the film itself. On one hand, I seek, in this paper, to locate the film in the arena of queer activism, I draw on concepts such as ‘outing’ and ‘closet’, ‘mainstream’ and ‘minority’, ‘self’ and ‘other’ to articulate the manner in which the logic of the film is implicated in the context of queer thought, queer issues. On the other hand, my paper seeks to reflect upon the implications of the entry of queer activism at the site of art. What happens to art when it becomes activist? The film is a three minute DV (digital video) presentation that was jointly directed by the two of us. The film thematizes queer identity: Bombay Longing dovetails between the personal and public in a manner that most art and often, much of literature does. To say that it occupies a political space would in that sense, not be incorrect although its stance is more understated. Put simply, it is not openly propagandist in making a statement about queer identity in a metropolis like Mumbai, but rather, allows the viewer to decode the tensions, possibilities and contradictions of such a subject position from the three personal narratives strung together. The central protagonist, the ‘artist’ herself, carries the narrative through public and private spaces negotiated by her, addressing what it means to travel these spaces as a queer person in a society which is largely heterosexist.
Museum Worlds: Advances in Research , 2015
My East is Your West (2015) and After Midnight (2015), two recent exhibitions of modern and contemporary South Asian art in Venice and New York, present an important opportunity to reflect on the changing relationship between museological spaces, curatorial practices, and the production of nationalist historiographies in South Asia. Both exhibitions suggest a shift in alignment away from prevailing national frameworks for collecting and display in South Asia—those prominently canonized by national museums in India and Pakistan—and that historically have inscribed museological spaces in South Asia as an extension of the nation-state and its ideologies. My East is Your West and After Midnight build, more specifically, on a growing body of exhibitions of modern and contemporary South Asian art whose curatorial interventions rely on a new and rigorous engagement with partition history, which has seen the subcontinent violently divided along religious and communal lines multiple times throughout the twentieth century
South Asian Popular Culture, 2011
The development of South Asian arts in the UK has gone from using typical colonial and ‘high culture’ showcases to using particular but still far more ‘mainstream’ formats, and has been publicly subsidised in a number of ways, including through community projects. In many respects, South Asian arts is not a ‘niche product’ any more due to the (mainly political) tension towards creating a distinctively ‘British Asian’ (or BrAsian) rather than a strictly ‘South Asian’ product. This paper draws upon two case studies of South Asian ‘cultural producers’ (Dudrah ‘Cultural Production’ 223) in Northern England to argue that showcasing South Asian art in Britain is a peculiar endeavour, the existence of which must account for multiple functions, multiple audiences and even international politics. The paper argues that recognising this fact has profound implications for the future of British Asian identities and for the negotiation between popular culture and politics.