Secret Trysts and Absent Presences

A group show focuses on the politics and poetics of queer belonging and un-belonging, intimates Lajja Shah.

- Lajja Shah

Hosted by Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, from the 11th of March to the 31st of July, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous sets up an inter-generational dialogue between three London-based artists whose works address the centrality of place as a physical, social and metaphorical locus for the production of queer intimacies.

Featuring photographs by Sunil Gupta, sculptures by Prem Sahib and paintings by Jake Grewal, the show, titled after a novel by Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong, illuminates the transient yet intense nature of desire as experienced by bodies that are marked by gender and colour. The works, though disparate in terms of their aesthetic strategies, are linked by diasporic contexts and shared solidarities that generate affective resonances across space and time.