Aditi Rakhe, curator of the Futures of Sexualities Festival, TIFA Working Studios, in an interview with the Asian Curator.
Trishla Talera with Zeesh
The western art history I studied, was divided into a convenient timeline but there is no counterpart for the Indian subcontinent. The concept of display culture was brought to us by colonization and I wanted to know what art, craft, design and visual culture meant to India before the subsequent effects of colonization on them.
Demystifying Drag, TIFA Working Studios
Tell us about your journey from Architecture to Art?
Architecture as a subject is versatile and multidisciplinary. It involves art, design, aesthetics, spatial understanding, history, culture, finance, management etc. This left me with a lot of room to explore what I was interested in, and then I did a postgraduate course in History of Art (University of Nottingham, U.K.).
Initially started working in exhibition design, then in research and curatorial teams in the Crop up gallery, Backlit gallery and Nottingham Contemporary in the U.K. At this point, I knew I wanted to be associated with art and cultural spaces and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.
Throughout my masters and then work in the U.K. I was interested in Indian and South Asian art. The western art history I studied, was divided into a convenient timeline but there is no counterpart for the Indian subcontinent. The concept of display culture was brought to us by colonization and I wanted to know what art, craft, design and visual culture meant to India before the subsequent effects of colonization on them. This compelled me to come back to India and understand what contemporary display and visual culture meant here first hand. I would also embark on an independent research for a PhD proposal.
Once back in India, I worked with Museum of Goa as a project manager for Goa Affordable Arts Festival and then at TIFA Working Studios as a Programmes head.
The Future of Sexualities Festival, TIFA Working Studios
How did your tryst with art begin?
I started reading about art history when I was quite young. This gave me the context in which I could approach art. I realised engagement with art or design need not just be making it but also viewing and absorbing it. In college I used to visit as many art spaces as I could get access to, which helped me understand how histories of art and visual culture have deep rooted social, cultural, political and economic impact which means the contemporary cultural sector is creating this right now can affect socio economic climates and spark imaginations and conversations. The cultural sector is vast and can be approached in many different ways. I started with invigilating positions in galleries, eventually understanding the roles management, curation, design etc. play in sustaining the creative ecosystem making my perception of art very holistic.
Demystifying Drag, TIFA Working Studios
What is the primary role of curator?
The primary role of a curator is that of a facilitator. To put it simply, curators bring together multiple voices on a specific subject to the same platform. Here, it becomes important to decide what subject you want to talk about and how relevant it is in a particular time frame. It’s also essential to know what voices one would like to represent and how to represent them.
Making creative practices accessible to as wide an audience as possible is what I’m interested in. Creative careers do not function in caves or bubbles, at the crux of it creative practices work with imaginative problem solving. Interactions between creative practitioners and other sectors such as economics, ecologies, digital, pedagogy, social justice, etc. is essential.
The visual creative practices are a language with no barriers. They are a tool to communicate things to a green audience who wouldn’t otherwise engage with the subject. When curators, creatives and arts facilitators, organise a platform that is accessible to a large multifaceted audience they make multiple voices from difficult conversations accessible and enable a cross pollination between multiple sectors, audiences and creative communities.
Photographs by Ishita, TIFA Working Studios
Take us through your curatorial process and continuous frameworks of reference.
For me the process is about of asking difficult questions, relevant to a particular context. Asking them to those who have answers, and those who they affect the most, to see how many perspectives come up. The process generally starts with personal research into a particular subject matter from my end. For example, Futures of Sexuality was informed by my research on gender and sexuality done as a part of my Masters Thesis. After this it is important to as questions such as – who are the stakeholders? Whom does the subject matter affect the most? What are the power dynamics within the subject matter? What makes the conversation important? How do we make the conversation accessible?
What part of the conversation are the works coming from? Does the conversation affect the artists and how? Is the work backed by research or is it backed by impulse or emotion?
Creative interpretations and explorations of the curatorial questions act as accessible language of communication. This informs selection of works or the process of reaching out to communities and individuals who you would want to include in the conversation. In terms of the works which form the final exhibition or program it becomes important to ask if they are challenging norms. After that I look at the process of collecting works spatially. I look at a festival or an exhibition holistically and how an audience or a viewer interacts with the same informs my process. This is where programming becomes important – not all audiences respond to the same medium – multiplicity of mediums is needed to facilitate interaction between different disciplines and perspectives.
The last step I believe is essential here is to comprehend how to mediate these creative responses to my research and curatorial questions to an audience. The goal is to reach at least some people who would never engage with these creative practices otherwise and make them comfortable enough with the same to want to do it again.
Chaitanya Modak, TIFA Working Studios
How do you balance the contradicting elements of your work?
I don’t think the different elements that go into making a creative program happen need to be contradictory. At the end of the all these elements be it operations/ management/ finances or the creative are all interconnected and need to function together. It’s also not a one-person job. It takes a village that collectively takes ownership of the final result together dealing with multiple things at the same time. Every single job in the team is essential which makes it important for every person in the team to be invested in the final event if not the curatorial concept. At the same time, coming from the perspective of a manager, it is important to have clear communication throughout this team and understand its value. If someone invigilating an exhibition does not feel like they are relevant enough to the exhibition or the exhibition isn’t relevant enough to them, why would they do it full heartedly?
Cultural management can be difficult but in the right space and team can be really fun. Professionals running operations, management, finances, social media etc. are the backend of any cultural event and function simultaneous to the creative practitioners, along with them.
Surabhi Chowdhary, TIFA Working Studios
How do you deal with the conceptual difficulty and uncertainty of creating something completely new like the FSF?
I believe the conversation is extremely important to have in the Indian context. Subjects like gender and sexuality are still a predominantly a taboo here. Conceptually there are so many conversations to be had around sexuality, gender and intimacy and we wanted to start the conversation and hence Futures of Sexuality happened. Uncertainty was a part of deal and we anticipated the same from the get go. The main intention was to understand what inclusivity means and how it can be obtained using conversations and discourse. We wanted to normalise the discourse around the subject.
Camp Out by Zeesh, TIFA Working Studios
How did it all come together? What were the biggest challenges?
I had researched gender, sexual spectrums and performatives as a part of my Masters’ Thesis and had been invested in the subject ever since. TIFA has an approach of looking towards the future, they were already doing programming around gender and sexuality. This formed the curatorial note. In TIFA’s experience of doing programs around gender and sexuality, with artists like Alok Vaid Menon and Hina Siddiqui, we found a need for open safe spaces in Pune for the community.
We met multiple stakeholders in the community – people who work in gender and sexual advocacy, people from the LGBTQAI+ community and most importantly institutes which have worked within the subjects of gender spectrums and performatives like Godrej India Culture Lab, The Humsafar Trust, 6Degrees and MIST. These were of great help for us in terms of formulating the program. Once, we had a program and curatorial call in place, we worked on marketing, funding and logistics.
We wanted the subject to be approached as a festival as opposed to just an exhibition. This is because we have a wide range of audience who all engage with different kinds of mediums. The festival format helps us engage with the subject through different angles – comedy, visual art, music, performance hence demystifying the nuanced concepts of gender and sexuality.
We started the festival with a comedy show featuring True Tinder Tales by Rohan Joshi and Shreemayee Das and Medium good by Aayushi Jagad followed by the exhibition opening inclusive of a performance by Shaunak Mahbubani. During the course of the exhibition we had film screenings by KASHISH Film Festival, a queer support meetup, a drag performance by Zeeshan (Kitty Su), a workshop on Boundaries in Relationships, a panel discussion on building inclusive spaces and closing performances by Luv Mahtani and Sanam.
The exhibition design itself was mostly informed by the TIFA building. It’s a beautiful 1940s art deco hotel which has a life of its own. This broke the white cube style of exhibition design I used to follow earlier. I also wanted each of the space in the exhibition to emulate a different future of sexuality which informed the flow of the display. The display was heavily influenced by the aesthetics of the artworks selected. A lot of the artworks were in video format making it important to break the display in a way that there is a good mix of physical, tactile work and video work. We focused a lot on how to make the entire experience of the exhibition as immersive as possible. We also set up a reading corner as a part of the exhibition. We know the conversations the exhibition started was very provocative and reading can add context to the same.
The operations and event management had fantastic support not only from our core team, interns and staff but also from the community TIFA has built for years. We got a lot assistance both in terms of resources and event management. All in all, it took a village to put it all together.
Lipika Bhargava, TIFA Working Studios
What were you looking for when you reviewed artists’ work for the FSF?
What we mainly looked for was works by people affected by and deeply involved in the conversation surrounding the curatorial questions of gender and sexuality. We also wanted to cover as many voices from the gender and sexual spectrum as possible. Apart from this, provocation/response to curatorial was essential in the works along with sensitivity and inclusivity. The call was actually limited to India but because of TIFA’s reach, the call rippled into international circuits. Almost all of the works selected had elements of both protest and celebration in them – protest against a societal normative, oppression, pain or lack of visibility along with celebration of gender, sexuality, how they can be performed, experienced and expressed.
Isha Itwala, TIFA Working Studios
How did your interaction/relationship with an artist evolve from the (brief) initial interface, to the working-involvement-relationship?
I think we end up developing a certain kind of relationship with artists in a context like that of a festival where the work is very intense especially in terms of time frames and logistics. For the Futures of Sexuality Festival, we encouraged artists to visit the festival and some like Aditya Verma and Sandeep TK even stayed at TIFA. I think working and interacting with them that up-close helps us understand them and their work better. We understand working styles and process especially when the artists are involved in something like display. Nachiket Prakash worked at TIFA for some weeks before the exhibition and Chaitanya Modak and Surabhi Chowdhary had to work with the TIFA building spatially in order to execute their immersive installations. These artists then ended up spending some time with the team, interacting with us and each other. We assisted performance artists like Zeeshan with the backend and production. This specifically was very interesting for me. I have predominantly worked with visual art and have very little experience and understanding in the amount of effort that goes behind performances let alone drag. We also ended up developing a good relationship with international artists like Zander and Sandrine via emails who are also showing interest in other curatorials at TIFA. It was a great experience to watch this community of artists get associated with TIFA, interact with one another and with team.
Nachiket Prakash, TIFA Working Studios
The accolades and hiccups. What was the biggest learning experience?
The biggest hiccup would be finding funding. But apart from that we also struggled with mediating the subject to a larger audience. In retrospect, I would put in active time and effort into understanding how to make the festival as accessible as possible and join the bridge between creative interpretations about gender and sexuality and an audience who would maybe not address the subject. In terms of accolades I think we got a good response from within the community and interest in working more with us around the subject in the future.
Tell us about your own personal evolution, vis a vis the participating artists’ journey.
The work with Futures of Sexuality gave me multiple perspectives on the subject and the ways in which they can be represented. More importantly, it showed me that theres much more to be unpacked. So much that we don’t understand about gender, sexuality and intimacy. Thanks to the digital platforms we now have more information than before, but information doesn’t mean we are sensitised to the subject. Working with the participating artists I saw how creative practices can become a language, aiding the process of communication. We have just scratched the surface with the first edition of the Futures of Sexuality this year. We need to continue doing the same work, with a hope that it forms a foundation for a more inclusive future. Its future versions in the years to come will help us truly understand the subject, its impact on social structures and cultures.
Aditya Verma, TIFA Working Studios.
Which shows, performances and experiences have shaped your own creative process? Who are your maestros? Whose journey would you want to read about?
I’m heavily influenced by space, architecture and urban theory apart from visual art. For example, The Practice of Everyday Life by De Certeau, concepts of panopticism by Foucault, The creation of space Henri Lefebvre. I’m interested in vernacular arts and design practice and also enjoy informing myself of media via video gaming, comic books or graphic novels as a form of aesthetic and visual engagement. In my research with gender and sexual performatives I like informing myself of India’s rich history on the subject along with writings by Judith Butler. I would also love to read more about journeys of indigenous creative practitioners – local creative communities and ways of life – since the people practicing the same often remain nameless and faceless.
An exhibition that I believe has stuck with me and informed my process the most would be The Place is here at Nottingham Contemporary. It looked at moment in British art history called the ‘Black arts movement’ which dealt with immigrant communities in the arts in Britain in the 1980’s. Engaging with it was both euphoric and painful at the same time, as a POC in Britain myself, but it left me wanting to know more. That is the kind of audience-interaction I would like to strive towards with my work.
Camp Out with Zeesh, TIFA Working Studios.
How did the audience interact and react to the TIFA Working Studios, Future of Sexualities festival.
Different elements of the program had different reactions. The exhibition had a very strong reaction considering the intensity of the work. Demystifying Drag, a ‘get ready with me’ talk by Zeeshan got us an audience of predominantly makeup school students who were there to know about the craft behind drag. The Queer Support Group had involvement from an audience as young as 17. So, all in all it was quite fantastic for us to see the range of audience we could get and how they interacted with different parts of the program.
What are you working on now? What should we look forward to?
I’m working with TIFA on programming a couple of different curatorial subjects like craft and innovation, urbanism and ecological sustainability. We will be planning out programs on the same for next year. We are also opening the first edition of Cyberia – New Media Playground curated by Anokhi Shah in December. We are looking into making Futures of Sexuality happen again as well. I am also working on my independent research on the effects of colonisation on Indian Art History for a PhD.
Before you go – you might like to browse the Asian Curator curatorial archives . Contemporary art curators and international gallerists define their curatorial policies and share stories and insights about the inner runnings of the contemporary art world.
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