Queer: Identity, Sexuality & Desire
Mansi Dhiman Mandhwani

“This exhibition celebrates the un-confinable and unflinching individualism of over 25 artist voices, self identified as QUEER, this exhibition works at the intersections of identity and life experience, genre and process…. shattering mythologies of desire and intimacies, the works range from polished and seasoned to raw and sometimes even incomplete, exposed as they are to the vulnerability of love and loss that is immediate and personal. Sometimes fearless, sometimes furtive, sometimes in the exploration of anticipation, they evoke presence, touch, comfort, absence, rage and despair like a shared infinite pole dance in space but with the spatial awareness of material and scale. They illuminate the complex landscape of gender, pleasure, fantasy and desire here, today, now.” -Myna Mukherjee


The dictionary meaning of word Queer is very clear, if we use it as verb it means spoil or ruin, if we use it as an adjective it means strange / odd and if we use it as noun it means homosexual; but the interpretation of queer is not as simple as if is defined in dictionary, it has a lot more to do with the identity of a human being. It gets more complicated, as well as simple, when it comes to queer art; it not only encompasses alternative sexualities but also encompasses extended issues of identity. The Queer theory has been established in the field of Critical theories in the early 1990s; largely derived from post-structuralist theory, and deconstruction in particular when a range of authors brought deconstructionist critical approaches to bear on issues of sexual identity and the construction of Heteronormativity (the normalizing practices and institutions that privilege heterosexuality as fundamental in society). But the establishment of Queer Art or bringing the Queer art into mainstream of a white cube gallery space is still on its way.