The Gender Bender Festival, that is currently being held in Bangalore (22 - 26 August), is a heady mix of artistes from across the country talking about gender and what it entails. From women calling out body shaming, an artist's expression of being raised by a single mother to a docu by a trans-woman who has changed the lives of many in the trans-community of Manipur, the fourth edition of the arts festival has gotten significantly bigger.
The five-day festival will see Jinal Sangoi bring Stories of Invisible Labour to life.
A graduate of California Institute of the Arts, Sangoi uses performance, installation, writing, sculpture and photography to construct temporary spaces to heal from individual as well as collective memory of violence, exploitation and segregation of women.
Being an inquisitive observer of domestic spaces, Sangoi noticed engravings on kitchen utensils:
Auto-ethnography led Sangoi to the Indian kitchen, where women spend maximum unpaid hours working for the family. For her project, she interviewed six women and engraved visual forms on their kitchen utensils. This was a process of creative resistance against the tradition of inscribing initials of the male head on the utensils.
Sangoi says,
Then, there is Ita Mehrotra’s Drawing Home, a visual narrative that explores gendered roles, especially in relationships, marriage and the idea of home.
Ita has grown up in a radically different home – run by a single mum, in the middle of feminist activist meetings, protests and demonstrations with constant dialogue on society, gender and patriarchy. Her work picks on different contemporary and historical struggles that women have led, that have shaped the country through socio-political and legal means.
Multi-disciplinary artist Deepikah Bharadwaj and social anthropologist Saakshi Joshi have collaborated to bring the installation Trial Room to life at the festival.
Initially just sketches for a potential zine that Deepikah was trying to create called “Madame aapka size nahi hai” based on her struggles with fashion, the duo amalgamated Saakshi’s poem The Trial with the art to synthesise it into a quirky and effective installation.
The creative process that went into this piece stem from their own lives; while Saakshi literally scribbled down these lines after returning from a clothing store, Deepika has always believed she is fat as no one ever let her forget that.
Sakshi’s poem Visa Blues was published in University of Kentucky’s journal Limestone, while It came from everywhere was long-listed for the Fish Poetry Prize 2016.
What’s amazing is that, a lot of prejudice is being addressed in these projects. For Saakshi, the words for Trial Room emerged from years of trying to manage her fluctuating weight -
Similarly, trans-activist Santa Khurai’s documentary on the life of a trans-child in Manipur’s Meitei community is a call to rally behind children of marginalised sections. She says,
Khurai identifies as a nupi maanbi or an indigenous Meitei trans-woman from Manipur.
Her film is about a trans-child called Ate who was given the name Monica and assigned the female gender at birth, but who always identified as a boy and wore shirts and trousers to school. More importantly, it is about the hopeful possibility that if an indigenous community can raise trans-children with love, along with ‘leikai paanba’ (neighbourhoods) that protect and provide a relatively safer space, so can the rest of the society.
Khurai, a member of the All Manipur Nupi Maanbi Association (AMANA) and pioneer of leading trans-people of her region to secure livelihoods, considers Gender Bender a great initiative for bringing important issues like these to the fore.
One of the judges of this edition, Mumbai-based playwright and stage critic Vikram Phukan agrees -
(Runa Mukherjee Parikh is an independent journalist with several national and international media houses like The Wire, Bust and The Swaddle. She previously reported for the Times of India. She is the author of the book 'Your Truth, My Truth (https://www.amazon.in/dp/B076NXZFX8)'. You can follow her at @tweetruna.)
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