An LGBTQIA+ collective from Ahmedabad brings unsung South-Asian narratives under the umbrella of its annual zine, Tilt. QueerAbad co-founder, Anahita Sarabhai, tells Ojas Kolvankar how up-and-coming queer artists are portraying their multi-hued perspectives.
What inspired you to start Tilt?
When we started QueerAbad we dreamt of many things. Co-founder and former member Shamini Kothari and I curated both the zines, as we were interested in queer art practices. Her interest came from an academic perspective and mine from an artistic one. We wanted to turn our interest into something tangible, so we continued thinking of how we could integrate design, make it accessible and give a platform to the queer community to showcase — and speak about — their work.
In the beginning, it was a passion project for both of us. We hoped to bring together the queer art that was around us but wasn’t being seen in mainstream media. Along with topics like body image, we wanted our identities to bleed into the artwork that we created. While we were thinking of a name for the zine, we went through multiple ideas that we thought could symbolise queer aesthetics, one of which was to consider something that is off-centre, or not straight. But we realised that the concept of tilting our perspectives and queerness itself function to do this; so we came up with Tilt.
Why is the zine focused on South-Asian queer people?
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