Kolkata Queer Arts Month

Kolkata Pride and Kolkata Queer Arts Month curator Kallol Datta are pleased to announce the title and theme of the first Kolkata Queer Arts Month; Eu(social) – rise, aftermath, and reemergence. The title draws attention to our immediate environment and the dystopian times that we are living in. It brings into focus on how living in seemingly cooperative groups in normative societies have led to structural, institutional, and personal failures.

The Arts Month will encapsulate the meanings of our times and will amass artists, thinkers, and collectives whose works and practices define the labour of navigating spaces, the politics, and the outpouring of hatred in the face of a queer existence.

For trans, queer and non-binary folks, existing under the guise of the heteronormative binary of love is at the very least exhausting and at the most life-threatening. Eu(social) – rise, aftermath, and re-emergence would like to probe the conditional attachments to jargon that continues to stifle lives – decolonization, decentralization, restorative justice, and resistance - through the lens of absolute equity, in the face of hyper nationalism today. The Kolkata Queer Arts Month will bring together queer and allied artists to pose interventions exploring how public and private spaces, community networks, governance and solidarity can be transformed to allow for viable queer ecosystems to thrive at a point in time where queer joy must make way for queer rage.

Kolkata and by extension, West Bengal seem poised to host a queer arts month; addressing complex propositions and platforming radical intercessions. Kolkata Pride with their expanded curatorial team seeks to disassemble notions of mobility, resistance, and legacies. Partnering with art spaces, cultural centers, academies and diplomatic institutions in the city; domestic and international queer and allied artists, art professionals, thinkers and writers will be invited to occupy spaces to exhibit contemporary art, fine art, new media and performance art. A public arts program for the month will also be on the agenda. Talks (onsite as well as online) will be held by practitioners and insiders to decentralize traditional art knowledge systems. Projects will be commissioned by the curatorial team wherein selected queer artists can work on an existing or new project; and exhibited at one of the sites during the Queer Arts Month.

The Kolkata Pride rainbow canopy was born out of our ever-growing demands for rights of intersectional equity and equality; the imagination for the empowerment of those amongst us who face oppression and the belief in the power of collective resistance. Kolkata Pride’s initiatives include the Trans and Queer Health Camp, Queernival, Sports and Parents Meet among others. Kolkata Pride also organises the Kolkata Rainbow Pride Walk (the oldest pride walk in South Asia) and supports

Dialogues: LGBTQI+ Film and Video Festival.

Kallol Datta is a clothes-maker who lives and works in Kolkata, India. He was awarded at Arts Network Asia Grant in 2019 and was a finalist of the Jameel Prize in 2021. Datta has exhibited widely including at the Aomori Contemporary Art Centre: Aomori, Art Jameel: Dubai, Beirut Design Fair,

Centro Cultural La Moneda: Santiago, Museum Franklin Rawson: San Juan,

National Museums Scotland:Edinburgh and Victoria and Albert Museum: London.

Curatorial team: Anindya Hajra,  Navonil Das

Press contact: info@kolkatapride.org

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