A South Asian Queer Pamphlet

Directed by Soumya Mukhopadhyay

Every visitor to this interactive web installation will take home their own queer pamphlet, based on the word they have spelled with a queer alphabet—from the A in Appearance, through Fluid, Intersectionality and other key concepts, to the Z in Theorize. Because each letter is linked to a short film showing the non-binary Indian performance artist Kaur Chimuk, the word automatically creates its own edit. With subversive queerness, these cinematically extremely varied performances, that are as vulnerable as they are powerful, enter historically and socially significant terrain, such as the 16th-century Jamali Kamali tomb of the gay poet and his lover, a dilapidated Portuguese church in Goa, or the famous steps on the banks of the Ganges in Varanasi. But equally, the artist places themself naked in an empty factory or dyeing their feet on a busy street corner. Together these images create a view of a non-binary future from a postcolonial, South Asian perspective.