 What I'm going to do today is just focus on one of the last projects that I worked on which is called What Are You and it's a project where I worked with the transgender transsexual hydro community which is the male to female transsexual community and specifically individuals from that community living in Bombay and Bangalore. Now my first contact with the community happened when I was involved as an activist in queer and feminist projects and I was organizing a queer film festival in Bombay and it was my first encounter where we'd been working under this rubric of LGBT rights and then just learning more about the community I realized we can't be bunched together because there are just too many differences between us which is also something which this show highlights in terms of global feminisms. So what I did was I was working with specific individuals of the community for about two years and parts of it were worked in collaboration with other artists and parts of it I worked on my own using the method of doing workshops, video workshops with the community to generate material and then rework on it as an artist. So what are you as a project finally culminated in a two-channel video installation sound photographs and I'll just run you through all of that. So in What Are You the pliable language of gender is explored in a physical concrete manner not only by my chosen subjects, members of the hydro community, male to female transgender and transsexual but also through the medium itself. Being casually between stage performances, documentary, music, video and appropriation What Are You creates a direct relationship to the subjects manipulation of their own gender. Now the reason the title of the work is What Are You as opposed to Who Are You is what are you actually is just a short excerpt from one of the interviews which was published in a human rights publication looking at violations against the hydro community was that the community and people from the community are always treated as extremely un-inhumanly so it's not who are you it's what are you you know as if you are an object or an animal somebody who is dirty illiterate all those kind of stereotypical associations. What Are You proposes an ironic subversive vision of utopia a utopia of perversion that is articulated through various modes and strategies of fantasy. This notion of utopian perversion is double entailing on the one hand a political utopia a vision of a perfect egalitarian democracy where all types of queer or perverse desires imaginings and social relations are allowed to flourish in the name of love and on the other hand the fantastic notion of a fabulous parallel world of perverse otherness a cosmic realm of jouissance just to tell you this is a two-channel video installation what you saw earlier was a video still from the same installation if you can hear me then you know I can just speak loudly and the two screens are mounted at a slight angle to each other and you can see the in relation to the audience so it's 11 minutes with color and sound and what I'm going to show you is a short excerpt from the installation itself it's a two-channel piece so I've made a kind of edited clip where you see one channel at a time and then the so that was about a two minute clip and I just want to share with you I mean it's fairly long experimental piece but the film opens with rapidly paced shots of the beach breakers and close-ups of skin of skin so the you know I've always been interested in sort of liminal and transitional spaces and the beach breakers that you see are a very prominent promenade in Bombay and it's something you know which is the what separates us from the sea and the land and then you go into the body and next the subjects appear full length figures against a black void of non-association these portraits removed from any context direct our attention to the physicality of several members of the transgender community there is something unsettling in the in this direct confrontation these women who are staring at us begin a recitation of their constitutionally guaranteed rights as if suddenly realizing the absurd comic ality of their performance the jarring contradiction between the lofty discourse of the constitutional rights democratic civil rights and the hijra's historical condition the lived experience as largely excluded discriminated against and despised community the women begin to chuckle and interrupt their recitation this interruption seems to constitute the secret formula the magicians one that triggers the invasion of the screen with huge red roses I just want to tell you a little bit why the red roses I mean there are several interpretations of this but one of the interviews that I was conducting and I asked one woman her name is rave tea you know what is the image of your life how do you see yourself and she said I see myself as a white rose in a garden of red roses and I have to prick myself with my own thorns in order to bleed and turn red so I can fit in with everybody so you know it's those kind of associations and metaphors from which some of the imagery is arising their performance is at first a wordless pantomime a self identifying ironic show an emphatically theatrical emphatically feminine ambiguous self representation come quizzical interrogation of the audience as if to say I am what you see and what you don't and perhaps will never see who are you so you know sort of this is an image in front of the video installation there was a set of barracks style beds and these are beds which are found also in the red light district which there are women sex workers as well as hydro sex workers and each of the I'm trying to go to the previous image but I can't each of the booths contained a set of headphones which contains sound which I will play very very little of which also relates to the idea of their life as sex workers so it is very kind of like lounge breakbeat but using it's electronically worked using a lot of the interviews and things like that and it says sex social work get up get ready go downstairs get a customer come back up and it sort of goes on a loop I'll just proceed further because I'm running out of time and further the work was installed I'd just like to show you with the work was again installed slightly differently with sets of very large gilded mirrors and again the sound is playing on the headphones which are available for the audience to pick up and on the wall is a text which says I'm often seen by people as a what's that to which I usually respond isn't beautiful enough and so these are some of the installation shots and then further I worked with three of the women who appear in the video on a series of fantasy photographs and this is the fantasy of Lakshmi one of the protagonist she's also a human rights activist and basically I've been conversation with them about how do they see themselves in their fantasy how do they want to in their ideal world conceive of themselves and you know I always was kind of I brought my own stereotypes because I often thought you know somebody will say oh I want to be a teacher I want to be a politician or I don't know something as inaccessible as that no but the first request I got was I wish to be Cleopatra and I thought well what do you know about Cleopatra and then I realized of course she knew everything about Cleopatra and has a special Cleopatra mug and all that so the title of the piece is the Bart she sat in like a burnished thrown burned on the water taking from Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra and it's it's you know it's a highly reworked image in the sense of each portrait has very much the personality of the protagonist as well as looking at how has Cleopatra been historically interpreted since we don't have an image of her and then we have a consort slave boy with a cot piece and all that so these are just some of the images from the shoot itself we actually shot on a barge in a small pond in the night in the middle of monsoons hoping it wasn't going to rain it was really and then of course she dies with the bite of the asp snake and then this is just like a production still this is Malini who also appears in the video her fantasy was that the title of this piece is you too can touch the moon yashoda with Krishna and her fantasy was to become a mother and that she's pointing to the moon and telling her child that look even you can touch this and so I decided to base this image on a Raja Ravi Varma painting titled Yashoda with Krishna the reason I chose Varmas painting as a reference point of departure is because it is an uncontested fact and an irony of history that the problematic utopian vision infusing these paintings became emblematic of colonial India's fraught modernity this photo fantasy of Malini's clearly meant to function as a perverse clearing of Ravi Varmas mythological pictures another colonial history that produced them of course there's a lot of attention that I paid to the art direction and detailing because it was very important that the fantasies were lived out to their fullest in that sense another image from the same production still that's Maheshwari this is called Maheshwari southern siren Maheshwari and her fantasy was to be a South Indian film star with another hero and in a kind of dance sequence so again you know I mean the background is completely worked on digitally again the roses appear as a reference back to the video and then these are just some production stills if you can say and that's Maheshwari herself in the gallery looking at her picture or other pictures it's also yeah then so apart from some of the larger images that you saw there were a number of small images in like very cheap kind of bazaar frames and they were extremely cheaply priced because I wanted these images to pluriply to to be out in the world and easily accessible and for people to take them and also somewhere as a kind of gesture of you know being in the art market and the commercial market but still trying to sidestep it in some kind of way so these are okay this is myself at my own opening what what I decided was that you know there's a huge class difference between me and a lot of the subjects that I work with the first one who's Cleopatra Lakshmi there is a less of a difference because she comes from the middle class her parents accept her she's able to live with them she had access to education so what I decided is in in Bombay now India the Indian contemporary art scene is really growing and we have very elaborate openings which are completely catered you know very fancy so I told my gallery that I didn't want any waiters and I decided to be a waiter along with a bunch of my friends and we especially stitched costumes and waited the entire evening which was kind of like a performance intervention so you can see and that's Lakshmi Cleopatra at the opening that's Malini who was the mother with the child at the opening some images with friends and yeah that's about it