The Promise of Beauty, 2023-
Does beauty belong to everyone? During the British colonial period in India, visual culture played a crucial role in shaping and disseminating imperial ideologies and their version of truth and beauty, which excluded all forms of indigenous knowledge and aesthetic notions of beauty. The Promise of Beauty is a self-portraiture series which examines and creates minor figures from (East India) Company Paintings – a hybrid style, which originated in India, by a range of artists under British patronage, amounting to a curious archive of unnamed subjects, only described by their profession reducing them to utilitarian objects. I have been exploring these with the themes of intimacy, vulnerability and desire to disrupt Euro-American versions of queerness. This project aims to give voice to queer people of South Asian descent, a subjectivity that rarely enters into queer British arts discourse. It raises the question – does beauty belongs to everyone while disseminating imperial ideologies and their version of truth and beauty, which excluded all forms of indigenous knowledge and aesthetic notions of beauty. This project is not just a critique of these insidious aesthetic tropes but a reclamation over queerness, that is free from Euro- American rigidness, and that announces the presence of Indian forms of beauties.
Read more about this work.
Re-Viewing Company Painting: Charan Singh's Queer Lens
Does beauty belong to everyone? During the British colonial period in India, visual culture played a crucial role in shaping and disseminating imperial ideologies and their version of truth and beauty, which excluded all forms of indigenous knowledge and aesthetic notions of beauty. The Promise of Beauty is a self-portraiture series which examines and creates minor figures from (East India) Company Paintings – a hybrid style, which originated in India, by a range of artists under British patronage, amounting to a curious archive of unnamed subjects, only described by their profession reducing them to utilitarian objects. I have been exploring these with the themes of intimacy, vulnerability and desire to disrupt Euro-American versions of queerness. This project aims to give voice to queer people of South Asian descent, a subjectivity that rarely enters into queer British arts discourse. It raises the question – does beauty belongs to everyone while disseminating imperial ideologies and their version of truth and beauty, which excluded all forms of indigenous knowledge and aesthetic notions of beauty. This project is not just a critique of these insidious aesthetic tropes but a reclamation over queerness, that is free from Euro- American rigidness, and that announces the presence of Indian forms of beauties.
Read more about this work.
Re-Viewing Company Painting: Charan Singh's Queer Lens