TRANSCENDENTAL OEUVRES

Cross-pollinating the conceptual with the tangible, Kolkata Queer Arts Month invites artists and visitors to look at queerness anew

- NIDA NAEEM

The city of Kolkata witnessed its annual pride parade on December 17, marking 24 years of South Asia's oldest pride procession since its debut as "The Friendship Walk' in 1999. As a city with a rich history of political activism, Kolkata's culture and arts scene is pulsating with an undeniable confrontation of the powers that be. This year, the Kolkata Rainbow Pride Walk also punctuated Kolkata Queer Arts Month, which is being held across two sites: The renowned art gallery Experimenter, and Kolkata Centre For Creativity, from December 8 2023 to January 3 2024. The inaugural edition of KOQAM promises visual art, multimedia installations, talks, walkthroughs and art residencies. Under the theme of 'Eu(social) - rise, aftermath, and reemergence', the curation has been done by clothes-maker and artist Kallol Datta, who says, “We had a very short time to prep for this and I wanted to include artists who also inculcate that same sense of urgency in their work to best capture the meaning of our times. We are living in a moment of multiple global crises and I wanted artists who speak to that through their practices, whether it's through rage, through different forms of care such as radical care or care in terms of reciprocity. But there's also a focus on new ways of community-building and knowledge-sharing."

BEYOND THE RAINBOW

Exemplifying new ways of knowledge sharing is chef Anumitra Ghosh Dastidar, co-founder of Edible Archives in Goa, who hosted a five-day long micro-residency exploring the links between food, memory and the sensory experiences that shape them. Experimenter also played host to a conversation between the author of Coming Out As Dalit, Yashica Dutt and columnist and podcaster Sandip Roy..