Copyright Agency CEO Adam Suckling says, “We are incredibly excited about CAP and the establishment of this competitive commission that will offer vital mentoring and financial support to artists such as TextaQueen. The commission will afford them the time and space to create, as well as supporting them with appropriate resources to ensure their work is curated and, importantly, exhibited and promoted to Australian audiences.”
In discussing their work, TextaQueen says, “Bollywouldn’t is a catchphrase decolonised; it is an imagining of utopia and reclamation of power. This work is an energetic offering that will inspire us South Asians to think about our relationship with the white gaze, how each of us can anchor in our subtext or prejudice and what we can do to dissolve it.”
TextaQueen’s commission will be created as small works on paper of queer and trans South Asians reclaiming the Bollywood movie poster format, based on portrait sessions whilst on residency at ACME, London. These portraits will be projection-mapped onto photographs, to create the illusion that they exist as actual murals that intervene with colonial structures and sites. It will be presented at 4A’s Haymarket, Sydney gallery on an epic scale.
“This idea is influenced by the experience of the pandemic, living life through the simulation of the digital screen as well as anticolonial, abolitionist, and Black Lives Matter movements, and the dethroning of colonial statues and reclaiming of colonial sites. The use of projection mapping and documenting in the gallery expands my practice into murals and contemplates the impact of images outside of institutions,” says TextaQueen.
To create Bollywouldn’t performances, TextaQueen will engage four trans and queer South Asians to interact with the works and projections in the exhibition. The performances will interpret the Bollywood genre in queer and decolonial ways, reclaiming colonial space and asserting identities usually marginalised.
4A’s Artistic Director/CEO Amrit Gill is elated to present TextaQueen’s work. “TextaQueen’s work is influenced through their lived experience as a person of South Asian heritage, and we’re privileged to be able to support them in the creation of their visionary work through this notable commission,” says Ms Gill. “Our organisation has been a leader in Asian contemporary art in Australia since 1996, and this opportunity with TextaQueen is significant, as their work makes invaluable cultural contributions with comments on broader structural contexts and representations of marginalised identities.”
“The CAP commission echoes my constant intentions of connecting with community and using texta as a mechanism to bring people together,” says TextaQueen.
TextaQueen’s Bollywouldn’t exhibition will be shown at the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in late 2022.
|