Built upon a collaborative practice of over 20 years, TextaQueen is a queer, disabled South Asian diasporic artist whose works continually push back against ‘the white gaze’.
In 2021, TextaQueen received the inaugural Australian Copyright Agency Partnership commission of $80,000 and their exhibition, Bollywouldn’t , which opened at Sydney’s 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (4A) in October this year.
Bollywouldn’t is an extension of TextaQueen’s 2019 residency at ACME London, where they collaborated with local queer and trans South Asian communities to reimagine a utopia in which their voices are at the centre of society, rather than ones that have been long marginalised.
The exhibition featured a trans-empowered map of London where the common tropes of Bollywood film (a genre that can reduce Indian culture to stereotypes perceived by a general Western audience) are transformed into murals that dominate some of the city’s most well-known architecture.
In TextaQueen’s map, the Palace of Westminster becomes (Bath) Houses of Parliament, ‘a premier spa experience nurturing queer sensuality’ whereas Tate Modern is ‘airlifted in an anarchist art heist’.
The speculative map completely took over the gallery at 4A with digitally rendered images such as Disney’s Jasmine and Aladdin engulfed in flames across the façade of the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Hindu goddess Nila on the side of a Brixton apartment block.
While the exhibition itself represented the opportunity for TextaQueen to extend their practice into works of larger scale and consider art outside of an institutional framework, the breadth of engagement is what took Bollywouldn’t to the next level for their community-centred practice.
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In an earlier interview, 4A Artistic Director and CEO Amrit Gill told ArtsHub: ‘Bollywouldn’t will open up space for important and long-overdue discussions about South Asian identities and community visibility for South Asian artists, as well as audiences in the Australian arts and cultural landscape.’
Alongside the exhibition, TextaQueen has used the commission to invite performers, writers and fellow creatives to curate a program that celebrates and empowers queer people and the South Asian diaspora.
More than 15 artists were brought together throughout the exhibition’s two-month duration to host performances and workshops, with the public program produced by Shareeka Hellaludin. A 52-page publication edited by GB Krishnan was also produced for the show, featuring 11 writers from the global queer and trans South Asian and Black diaspora.
In many ways, TextaQueen’s practice is one that is shared with their community, where the artist acts as a facilitator of discussion and creates a platform for diverse voices. They are also currently in the process of fundraising for a dedicated residency for diverse disabled visual artists, TheySwarm, to be hosted at TextaQueen’s studio.
While Bollywouldn’t is a reclamation of the Bollywood caricature laden with imperial history, the exhibition also sought to further encourage understanding of the South Asian diaspora through platforming different voices and collaborative practices.
As Gill concluded in the exhibition text, ‘Bollywouldn’t echoes TextaQueen’s constant intentions of connecting with the community and using their practice as a mechanism to bring people together.’
Bollywouldn’t showed at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art from 22 October to 19 December 2022.
