Desiring queer

In a tell-all piece, Myna Mukherjee gives us an insight into how she's navigating life as a queer art curator and cultural producer.

- Myna Mukherjee

They say that the way we will end up is coded into us from the moment we are born. But it took me a long time to desire and embrace my life as a queer curator and cultural producer. What makes art queer? Does it follow the same definition as one might use to describe a queer person? For me, no one queer identity is the same, nor are there any assumptions that queerness is only ever one thing and one experience. It validates all experiences as unique but equally real and human. Hence, placing queer curating in a singular box is also like the antithesis of queer curating. Only when the process is disruptive such as technology—continuously challenging existing norm, identity, and meaning—does it feel authentically queer. Of course, queer curating explores the spectrum of gender, sexuality, and desire but it goes much beyond that. It centres feminist, intercultural, postcolonial, and decolonial studies towards cultural, artistic, and political representations that interrupt dominant culture and compel us as viewers, artists, and curators to think beyond binaries, build empathy, and not just acknowledge differences but truly celebrate ‘otherness’. They also provide that ephemeral, liminal space that has allowed me personally the respite of not knowing every unknown and leaving that which remains unresolved in solace. Knowing that sometimes one may never know the whole story, that there is the intangible, the fabulism and magic realism of life is an essential queer experience for me.