Art
TARSHI at gFest, Gurugram
This exhibition covered themes such as gender roles and division of labour, migration and belonging, disability and queerness, and the lived experiences of women artists.
By TARSHI
November 19, 2024
Quick Bytes with Taash
The relationship with my body is so fragmented that there’s not a primary “real” me, and that’s also how I locate queerness within disability.
By Taash
November 19, 2024
Brushstrokes: Bodies, Beauty and Boundaries
Women’s bodies are considered as symbols of izzat and abru (honour and dignity) making it the woman’s responsibility to ‘protect’ her sexuality, while at the same time, her sexuality is controlled by patriarchs.
By Rinku
August 10, 2023
Brushstrokes: Aching Palates
This art collection bears the evocative title “Aching Palates”. Within its realm, each artwork embodies an emblematic act that accompanies…
By Anoushka Budhia
July 17, 2023
‘किमाम वाली रात के नाम’ – भारतीय इतिहास में पान की शृंगारिक भूमिका
Within its realm, each artwork embodies an emblematic act that accompanies the intricate ritual of food: hunger, gathering, fire, serving, devouring and, ultimately, nourishing.
By Annika Amber
Brushstrokes: Body in Sexuality
Body is born, as a collection of many parts, into the various collections of bodies. Different combinations or collections are projected onto various historical, spatial and temporal dimensions, out of our needs, desires and capabilities.
By Abhinand Kishore
June 1, 2023
More than Striking a Pose
“Something about this pose brought about a sense of owning my body, my persona, my expression, my sensuality, my whole being. The drop of the hip made the bottom vertebrae curve, and appear out of alignment from the rest of my spine. A deviance, defiance of the normal straight stance. A resistance, a revolt of sorts.”
By Robin
March 17, 2023
How We Reimagine and Redefine Freedoms
Every part of life, the world too, is storied. Stories are the thread that hold histories and truths together. Stories are at the core of myth-making. Everything that we know is part of multiple crisscrossing relational storylines that we raise and those that we have no power in raising.
By Curated Content
March 15, 2022
Interview – This is what you bring to the table!
In this write up, we’d like to share a sense of what emerges from a compilation of these responses. This is based on the thoughts and feelings that come through for those of us here at In Plainspeak who have had the joy of reading the original responses as they came in to us. (Some of the quotations that follow have been slightly edited for flow and to help connect themes.) We know that most things in the realm of art, information and ideas lend themselves to a wide range of inferences and insights depending on the individuals making the inferences.
By Shikha Aleya
March 1, 2022
Brushstrokes – Scribbles
Scribbles: an Escape From the Mundane is a product of my thoughts and emotions when I was struggling to understand my sexuality and grappling with the idea of identifying with the spectrum of gender and sexuality outside the binary, but not being able to put a label on it.
By Nishita Kamdar
March 1, 2022
Brushstrokes – Celebrating Sexuality
Taboos in relation to female desire, sexuality and the body are often addressed in my work. My recent artistic interest focuses on rituals that are primarily centred on agricultural communities in Bengal that involve the veneration of fertility symbols and celebration of feminine sexuality.
By Mitali Das
March 1, 2022
Reclining Vulnerability
Through multiple maquettes, I finally came across (since I myself did not know what the result of the form or figure would be) the Reclining Lady. She represents confident femininity and vulnerability. The feeling one has after taking a bath and sitting in the nude, drying oneself in unabashed nakedness.
By Noella Fernandes
April 19, 2021
Interview – Indu Harikumar
I was watching something recently that said it was a bad thing to be vulnerable, but I don’t think it is a bad thing. I do see that there is a certain amount of power in vulnerability, it also needs courage, in my experience.
By Shikha Aleya
April 5, 2021
Please Touch: Tactile Art as a Medium of Exploration
Most of us, during childhood, internalised the lesson that sex or pleasure is ‘dirty’ and ‘bad’. Artists around the world are increasingly using ‘tactile art’ to challenge the shame and embarrassment that people feel when they look at their bodies.
By Isha Vajpeyi
August 14, 2020
Interview: Diversity and Sexuality – Part 2
Here, in Part 2, each interviewee addresses aspects of sexuality and diversity from their own particular space of personal knowledge, as well as work, advocacy, art and activism across diverse fields.
By Shikha Aleya
May 15, 2019