Gender Bender is the first festival of its kind in India that showcases new works of art around gender, as concept, discourse, construct, and as art itself, creating a space for gender with artists and audiences alike.The festival aims to contribute to the ever-evolving understanding of gender and its implications, to help produce works that re-examine and re-imagine the concept.
The project is conceived and conceptualised by
Sandbox Collective in collaboration with the
Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan.
Gender Bender 2021 is envisioned as a digital manifestation of the physical festival – an interactive online space for audiences to engage with.
Jury: An independent panel, comprising of
Ambika Joshi, Nadika Nadja, Renuka Rajiv and
Swati Bandi have shortlisted the projects to be supported.
Grantees & their project ideas:
© Adil Kalim
Adil Kalim (New Delhi) completed his B.F.A in Art Education and M.F.A. in Graphic Art (Printmaking) from the Jamia Millia Islamia University. His work showcases the issues that he has come across since his childhood. Society’s fixation with the cookie cutter model and their distaste for nonconformity has always been a major concern in his artworks. Our obsession with labelling and boxing anyone who is ‘different’ is at the core of all his work.
Project Details: His project aims to portray the unseen beauty of our lives. This is presented through vivid images layered with text and illustrations on book covers. Books - being a symbol of knowledge, awareness, tolerance, and understanding - will be used to present the idea that a person’s life is like a book, that others are yet to read. The project aims to drive home the idea of how similar the lives of queer persons are to the people who reject their very place in society through the use of unacceptable language.
© Anurati Srivastva
Anurati Srivastava (Gurgaon) is a playful-learning experience designer and new media artist. Over the past five years, she has designed children's interactive media - including games, digital products, visual narratives and curricula - that promote social-emotional learning and global citizenship education with organizations such as UNESCO, Katha and UNFPA. She has an interdisciplinary academic background in engineering, science and liberal arts. She is an Arts for Good Fellow 2021 and a Young India Fellow 2017.
Project Details: Malika-e-Marzi (Queen of my own Volition) – or the princess can save herself, is a platformer interactive game that subverts the trope of platformer games, of the man rescuing the princess or the damsel in distress. The game follows the lives of real-life powerful queens and princesses that have ruled over the Indian subcontinent and narrates their eclectic stories of valour and rebellion, and how they have saved themselves in the face of trials, deviating from the archetype and popular narrative of women under the Mughal empire.
© Dheeraj Kumar
Dheeraj Kumar (Muzaffarpur) is a trained Fashion Designer turned Photo Artist. He has worked in various domestic export houses while simultaneously learning and practicing the craft of photography. He is inspired by personalities such as Frida Kahlo, Robert Mapplethorpe and Henry Moore and aspires to define with the lens, his personal approach towards life, beauty and art. He travels to the sleepy villages of southern India to capture the moods, culture, colours that drew him to this region in the first place. The human form with its many complexities and layers is another quest and a constant source of inspiration.
Project Details: MAUGA is envisioned as a photobook. In his own words, “it took me years to understand myself, though it appears as if society had already decided who I was, even as I was still discovering myself, simply because society doesn't seem to care for my emotions.” He hopes this project will offer him and others who feel ‘different’ a new perspective to help celebrate and embrace our uniqueness rather than feel ashamed because there can never be one right way when it comes to Gender.
Johnson Rajkumar
Johnson Rajkumar (Imphal) is an award-winning documentary filmmaker. His documentary, Fireflies, which explored gender dynamics during conflicts and armed violence in Manipur has been featured in several international and national film festivals. He is currently a film conservator and an archivist in the Manipur Film Archive. His interest is exploring collective memories through material and visual culture.
Project Details: 'Eigi Wari' (English Translation: My Story) is an online video archive of Nupi Manbi, indigenous transgender women of Manipur. The archive is a ruminative visual anthology exploring the Nupi Manbi experience-of their identities-through mnemonic testimony, observational moments, and fragmentary impressions. The testimonies in the project are designed to critique patriarchy by exploring the idea of ‘safe spaces’ in Manipur.
© Prerit Jain
Prerit Jain (Indore) is a toy and game designer based in Indore. His practice revolves around playfulness and the role of emerging technology as a medium for human connection with oneself and the other.
Project Details: Fancy dress tries to provide a space with props centered around gender, for people to connect with their childhood; a space that encourages them to be playful and expressive.
© Saad Khan
Saad Khan & 'Little Boxes' (Bangladesh) Saad Khan is a PhD candidate in the Dept. of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington with an extensive background as a qualitative researcher in the areas of gender, sexual and reproductive health and rights, masculinity, disability, and education. 'Little Boxes' is a self-taught artist and PhD candidate in the Dept. of Social and Political Science at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. They are researching the contestation between decoloniality and digital culture in the queer politics of Bangladesh and West Bengal.
Project Details: Queer research through a digital zine and podcast series in Bangladesh aims to propogate knowledge and critical conversation on how to conduct queer research (research on queer issues and queer forms of research) in Bangladesh through the creative medium of a digital zine and podcast series with South Asian researchers working at the intersections of art, activism, and academia.
© Sharanya Ramprakash
Sharanya Ramprakash (Bangalore) is a theatre maker working at the intersection of gender, tradition and language, with a focus on Kannada culture. She writes, acts, directs and collaborates with a range of forms, communities and theatre makers across local, national and international locations. Her work is research-based, collaborative and exploratory. She is interested in the gaps between binaries such as Man-Woman, Urban-Rural, Traditional-Modern, Kannada-English and her work thrives in these in-between spaces.
Project Details: #MalashreeChallenge is a social experiment on popular mainstream platform MX TakaTak, Josh and Moj. 20 feminists take up the #MalashreeChallenge to co-opt the filmography of Kannada Lady Superstar KanasinaRani Malashree into the trans-feminist narrative. Can Malashree’s gender-bending filmography catapult her into an icon for transfeminism in Kannada pop culture? Will the #MalashreeChallenge go viral?
© Sudhamshu Mitra
Sudhamshu Mitra, Shraddha Sharma, Yash Jain (Bangalore) come from interdisciplinary backgrounds - a teacher, workshop facilitator and social researcher, a coder for a better world, and a project manager with a liberal arts background - respectively. What brings them together is their interest in working towards an equitable world by reflecting on their own privilege and on the invisible ways in which caste operates, and a desire to lay bare their own backyard. Through comics, music, research and technology, they have been working towards producing anti-caste work that puts the focus back on savarnas. Pursuing an M.Phil. in Women's Studies at JNU, software development at Yousician, and project management in a gaming start-up are each of their day jobs.
Project Details: Do we become casteless on dating apps? Or do we reinvent heteronormative brahmanical ways while finding love, sex and everything else?
//CasteNoBar is an interactive digital installation based on narratives of how cishet savarnas navigate dating apps.
© Teresa A. Braggs
(Bangalore) is a Bangalore-based experimental media practitioner and has worked with the media of found text, documentary sound, visuals, and the moving image in prior artistic work.
Project Details: What’s coming? is an audio-visual exploration of queer sex. Grounded in the practice of experimental media, this project is a study on fucking and the sexual body.
© Twisha Mehta
Twisha Mehta, Kabir Chaturvedi, Shagnik Chakraborty (Bangalore) represent a collective working between the lines of technology, gender and art over the last two years. Their work is built upon collaboration; where individual ideas and skill sets merge. Twisha works with gender issues through art, publication design and writing; Kabir works with emerging technologies with a focus on AR; while Shagnik is a visual designer and Illustrator who has worked in publication and journalism.
Project Details: Genre is envisaged as an online space for gender discourse. It uses music and its ever-evolving set of genres as a metaphor to introduce ideas of gender as genres. With music at the core of their project they would like to dwell on the premise of gender and sexuality as a spectrum rather than limited to a binary.
© Vastavikta Bhagat
Vastavikta Bhagat (Mumbai) is an architect, narrative artist, digital archivist and Assistant Professor at the School of Environment and Architecture, Mumbai. She works with drawing out narratives, data, language and archives. Her recent experimentation with code and new forms of archives led to questioning what it means to inhabit digital spaces through their experiential dimensions. The themes of some of her ongoing work also focuses on spatial and environmental politics surrounding post-intensive mining landscapes and climate change in Indian cities.
Project Details: A home in many pieces (An archive of household portraits) looks at unravelling the dominant socio-cultural narrative consolidated through time where caste and gender biases have put forth a singular identity /idea of an ideal household. Within this exclusionary framework, any form of gender non-conformity and queerness outside the configuration of the ideal family is termed as invalid, which in turn has implications on the visceral experience of inhabiting physical and digital spaces. She proposes that many households beyond the conventional frame are built on gender solidarities and friendships which create alternative imaginations of a home that are unique and based on the spaces and networks we access. She looks at putting together an archive of these experiences and friendships through a series of portraits of homes, experiences of gendered and queer households through collected and found imagery, sound, noise and narrative drawings by mobilising fiction.
The
works of all the 11 grantees will be
available on a specially created interactive
digital space filled with architecture, gardens, fantastical creatures and other amusement. For the audience this will be a playful, interactive space where you can walk, run or even jump, turn corners, look at the objects that float down from the sky or sit by the waterfront. This space was specially created by
Anokhi S and the folks at
IOVR.
Curated section of the Gender Bender Festival:
Aisa-waisa kuch kyun hota hai saheli?
Riddles of gender. Riddled with songs.
With Z J* TejasAP
December 10-12. 2021, 5 p.m. on Zoom
Gender in Bollywood oscillates between two states of being: straitjacket and chiffon. But, given a chance, it really blossoms in a myriad of expressions to our great delight. Over three sessions of radio-style interactions on Zoom (think Vivdh Bharati, ye children of FM radio!), we will sing, watch, hum, and gossip together to celebrate gender expressions in popular Hindi cinema new and old.
Participants will register on zoom, log in and await their turn to join the show as participants.
A live show, this will later be available for viewing on instagram.
Lunar Levitations with Luckamma
Unravelling the future of your love life
December 10-12. 2021, 6.30 p.m. on Instagram
InstaLIVE on Sandbox Collective @sandboxcollective
The 90s kids had Linda Goodman, 2021 brings us Luckamma, the long-legged lioness.
Is your love-life bumbling along, hinged or hanging about, waiting on a Cupid with no kindling in your tinderbox? Love and lust are difficult areas to navigate, and we could all do with a little bit of luck and laughter. So let the OG shewolf, Witch of the Waste, Fortune Teller to the Stars, Fire Eater of Fatehpur Sikri -LuckLookLukamma help you find your true light. At her disposal are crystal balls and coffee cups, fortune cards and eye-shadow.
*As a feminist crusader she possesses a sharp blade that cuts right through patriarchy and bullshit.
The #GBRedCarpetChallenge
This is a fun challenge created by performer
Rency Philip and friends for this year’s festival. Fun and Masti is assured for all, in addition, some lucky respondents will receive the
Gender Bender 2021 festival kit.
The #GBRedCarpetChallenge involves music, dance, dressing up and a whole load of fun stuff we’ve always wanted to do but never found the space to.
On Instagram @sandboxcollective
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