OAKLAND, Calif. — A big portrait of three femmes sits on the entrance of the Oakland Asian Cultural Heart. Photographed by Simrah Farrukh, they stand united with their lengthy, darkish braids draped over a inexperienced and orange chunni. One other photograph showcases a grandfather posing proudly in entrance of portraits of Dalit anti-caste advocate and lawyer B. R. Ambedkar and Fifteenth-century Dalit Guru Ravidas.
These hanging photographs introduce Dalit Dreamlands, one in all California’s first queer artwork exhibitions centering the experiences of Dalit, Adivasi, Bahujan, Afro-Indian, Indo-Fijiian, Indo-Caribbean, and Muslim communities of South Asia and its multivalent diaspora, on view by this Saturday, June 8. Included alongside works by 40 artists, Farrukh’s photographs are additionally the primary by which curator Manu Kaur’s relations overtly and proudly acknowledge their caste-oppressed Dalit ancestry. Kaur, an activist and curator based mostly in Oakland, was partially impressed by Guru Ravidas’s imaginative and prescient of Begampura: a stateless, casteless, and classless society.
“My household is Ravidassia, and I wished to create my model of Begampura which additionally contains queer, trans, pro-Black, and pro-Indigenous identities, and highlights of us who’re marginalized at so many alternative intersections,” Kaur advised Hyperallergic in an interview, including that they skilled deep despair in 2022 whereas navigating their Dalit, queer, and trans identities. It introduced an added layer to their definition of Begampura, which they described as “a spot with pleasure and happiness, but in addition disappointment as grief and as therapeutic.”
“It was vital to have these a number of truths and to heart the neighborhood,” Kaur mentioned.
With the help of the Rising Curators Program by the Asian American Girls Artists Affiliation, Dalit Dreamlands begins mapping this imaginative and prescient of therapeutic for South Asian minoritized and caste-oppressed communities with an acknowledgment of Dalit struggling. Artist Ajay Dhoke’s “The Pot of Perception: A Visible Story of Caste Discrimination” (2023) captures the underbelly of a person with a clay pot strung round his neck. Taken throughout a 2023 efficiency of the play Vadsa Sindevahi written and directed by Ma. D. Ann. Shande at Prerana Theater in Chandrapur, India, the picture depicts the oppressive historic apply of forcing Dalit folks to put on pots round their necks to catch their saliva. One other of his pictures from the play, “Root/Foot: Symbols of Dalit Id Erased by Merciless Mandates” (2023), demonstrates how Dalits had been pressured to erase their footprints with a brush hooked up to their waists, one in all a vary of dehumanizing practices designed to strengthen caste supremacy.
For artist and ecological activist Anika Nawar Ullah, the exhibition and her contribution are a possibility to “stroll the skinny line between pleasure and ache, decay and re-genesis.” Her experimental documentary-fiction brief movie “Anatomies of Displacement” (2024) traces generational displacements, from her maternal Indigenous Marma lineage to her personal expertise shifting from the Bay Space.
Ullah’s deal with commingled oppression and pleasure reverberates by Dhoke’s collection Echoes of Revolution: Gondi Dance of Resilience (2023), framing the anklet-adorned, calloused, and powerful toes of the ladies of the Gondi tribe, one of many largest tribal teams in India. Capturing the power of conventional dances and rhythmic patterns, the photographs are an ode to the creative practices that defy historic discrimination.
Nazrina Rodjan, a queer artist whose work reclaims the neglected histories of Indo-Caribbean communities and South Asian queer ladies, attracts deeply from her household, communal relationships, and private experiences in her portray “Kissing Brides” (2018).
“It remodeled queer South Asian love into one thing celebratory throughout a time once I felt very rejected by the world for being brown and queer,” Rodjan mentioned. Past self-healing, she hopes the exhibition and her physique of labor can present future generations with “photographs of our historical past not based mostly on exotification and dehumanization by the colonizer.”
Nearing the tip of the exhibition, guests attain the ultimate stage of therapeutic by Malvika Raj’s acrylic portray “Amitabha” (2021), depicting Buddha with eyes half-open in a state of tranquil enlightenment within the heart of concentric circles of fish, deer, and peacocks.
The woke up Buddha signifies “infinite mild and infinite life for each being, together with Dalit communities, Raj defined. Her work goals to subvert Hindu dominance inside Madhubani portray, a historic Indian artwork type characterised by vibrant colours and detailed, dotted patterns, by interweaving her Dalit familial historical past and imagery of Buddha.
“Via their struggling, the Adivasi found a imaginative and prescient of therapeutic, of Amitabha, and overcame their ache,” she continued. “My query was: How did they discover that imaginative and prescient? How did they discover a option to heal and transfer on?”
The expertise of taking part in Dalit Dreamlands offered every contributing artist their very own reply to this query. For Rodjan, as an example, therapeutic meant discovering a real sense of belonging and possession of her South Asian identification.
“I used to withstand the ‘South Asian’ label as a result of my experiences with it had been primarily with privileged, upper-caste Indian communities. I most well-liked to establish as Indo-Caribbean in South Asian areas,” she mentioned. “However on the Dalit Dreamlands opening, for the primary time, I didn’t really feel just like the odd one out. I felt seen, included, and genuinely linked to the house and the tales of the opposite artists.”
And for Kaur, therapeutic whereas curating the exhibition arose by a way of continuity. This present, they defined, isn’t an finish however relatively a starting.
“I spotted that this exhibition doesn’t have to be a one-time factor,” they mentioned. “Its work, and the referenced historical past, will be revisited and reclaimed time and again.”
