Founder of Pink List India, Anish Gawande, Creative Director of Gaysi Family, Priya Dali, and Founder of Dalit Queer Project and Dalit Art Archive, Aroh Akunth, and artist Chathuri Nissansala engage with gaps and erasure of queer voices in South Asian art history and explore the possibilities emerging from and the limits inherent within visibility in the future.
Anish Gawande: Anish Gawande is a writer and translator now based in New Delhi. He is the director of the Dara Shikoh Fellowship, an interdisciplinary arts residency in Kashmir, and the founder of Pink List India, the country’s first archive of politicians supporting LGBTQ+ rights. Anish graduated from Columbia University with a degree in comparative literature. He then read for a master’s in intellectual history and public policy at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.
Priya Dali: Priya Dali is an illustrator and storyteller from Mumbai. A maker of many, very queer things, her work engages in conversations about gender, sex and sexuality and strives to make them accessible through comics, zines and other creative formats. She is the Creative Director at Gaysi Family, a media platform and safe space for queer desis that was formed in 2008.
Aroh Akunth: Aroh Akunth is a Dalit-Trans* interdisciplinary artist based between Berlin and Delhi. Their social art interventions such as Dalit Queer Project, Dalit Art Archive focus on generating critical communities with care. With their work Aroh is interested in not only allowing their audiences a glimpse into the life worlds of their communities but also providing alternatives for our societies. Some of their collaborative work can be found at www.dalitarchives.com
Chathuri Nissansala: Chathuri Nissansala is a Sri Lanka-based multidisciplinary artist. She has performed and exhibited including ‘Crafting the Cross Roads’ at Dhi art space Hyderabad (2022), and Rehang, curated by Uthra Rajgopal and Anant Art, Bikhaner house, Delhi ( 2021). Currently, she is carrying out her apprenticeship under artist Somapala Pothupitiye learning southern curative ritualistic practices and their tradition of costume-making at Mullegama Art Centre (MAC), Colombo, Sri Lanka.
Titled ‘Align & Disrupt’, the talks programme curated by independent curator and educator Shaleen Wadhwana, and supported by Shiv Nadar – Institution Of Eminence, aims to align voices of leading artists and arts professionals on critical issues in the arts ecosystem, and collectively disrupt the status quo to shape a more aware and inclusive art world of the future. For the first time, the key learnings and insights from these talks will be documented in an action-plan which will be widely circulated and made accessible to the public on the India Art Fair website. All talks will be conducted in Indian Sign Language.
