Gupta tells me that he has often contended with “showability”. “I’ve met many people who are really interested in my work,” says Krishan, “but they won’t buy it because they can’t hang it in their homes.” Sunil Gupta, from the Sun City series, courtesy the artist And for the art world, it often boils down to the difference between collectors who buy gay artists and those who don’t. Legal or illegal sex aside, there are things that do not change overnight. “But after that, it’s society that has to change. “The law was just about sex,” Krishan points out. And of course, poorer, more rural and less educated parts of society are the most excluded from the global narrative of pride and empowerment. Courtesy of PhotoInkīut at the same time, gay people in India still face discrimination in employment, housing, education, healthcare and public services. Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, Sisters in bed, c1932. Although the three-and-a-half-month festival in Kerala contended with certain controversies over allegedly unpaid construction workers, Dube’s curatorial vision set a high precedent for the potential of India’s art sector to address the queer question. In contemporary art, the biggest celebration was perhaps the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, directed by prominent LGBT artist Anita Dube. The simple fact of no longer feeling “criminal” has undeniably provoked a surge in LGBT confidence in India’s creative industries. February saw a major Bollywood producer release a film about a lesbian love affair, written by a transgender woman and India’s first Pride anthem, by Swedish musician Petter Wallenberg and Indian drag queen Sushant Divgikar, was released at the start of this month. A performance by artists Aryakrishnan (Biennale artist), Gee Imaan Semmalar, and Raju Rage at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale And for many, it’s a moment to look back on the past six months to see what the impacts of the legal change really are. With India’s national elections kicking off, the question on gay people’s minds is to what extent LGBT issues will be mainstreamed into party policies. Some six months since then, Brunei has put the criminality of gay sex back on the table. And if India’s back-and-forth on the issue over the past decade suggests anything, it’s the precarious position of LGBT people under a politically polarized state. The works will celebrate the remarkable achievement made last year-the two fingers stuck up at a state that wanted to police what gay people did with their bodies. The Woman Inside The fable of Balbir Krishan, Shiva, Mohini and Harihar, 2019īalbir Krishan, another artist in the show, recalls that it was around the time of last autumn’s repeal in India that he began working on two new pieces to display in Bangkok.
As businesses worldwide face boycotts for their links to Brunei, an exhibition like this in Thailand could not have come at a more powerful time.
The works capture a timeless picture of queer activism, and they’ll go on display this November at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre in a show entitled Spectrosynthesis II-set to be Asia’s largest ever LGBT art exhibition. “But these young people weren’t willing to wait endlessly.” “I was used to an older generation who just didn’t think it would happen in their lifetimes,” he reflects. They went on to organize the first Pride march in New Delhi and were active campaigners for the 2009 ruling. He recalls how impatient for change his subjects-mostly in their twenties-were.
It was in the lead-up to that 2009 ruling that photographer Sunil Gupta created The New Pre-Raphaelites, a series that visualized a newly emerging range of sexualities in India, drawing on the queer use of colour, composition and expression of Pre-Raphaelite paintings.