Module #2: Queer Labour by Fadescha
Details
Fri, 9 August–Sat, 17 August 2024
@72-13, Home of T:>Works
Fri, 9 August, 7.30–10.30pm (1 session)
Sat, 10 August, 2–10pm (2 sessions)
Sun, 11 August, 2–10pm (2 sessions)
Wed, 14 August, 7.30pm (Public Lecture)
Thu, 15 August, 7.30–10.30pm (1 session)
Fri, 16 August, 7.30–10.30pm (1 session)
Sat, 17 August, 2–10pm (2 sessions)
This event has concluded.
Working towards a manifesto for a future space and time essential towards empathetic futures, participants will have opportunities to absorb and discuss through artworks and texts, and sessions of embodied practice. The focus will be on voices and lived-experience of the structurally marginalised, as we witness the sites and forms of Queer Labour, the labour of surviving the everyday.
Participants will assay Fadescha’s ‘Qworkaholics Anonymous’, a project that reimagines the format of de-addiction programmes like Alcoholics Anonymous, and creates a time and space for marginalised individuals to acknowledge and celebrate the labour of their very act of survival. Such labour is often dismissed as unproductive by the neoliberal order, whose measures overlook the exhaustion of individuals excluded from the hegemony, who constantly navigate obstacles and defend their identities.
In a society that values isolation and self-abandonment, over self and collective care, prioritising one’s own needs and wellbeing is a form of resistance. Together, participants will read through ‘The Twelve Steps of Qworkaholics Anonymous’ designed to de-addict from the ‘burnout’ faced while doing this labour, through a metaphysical connection with ourselves and our peers. The module will be guided by emotion and intuition, rather than try to succeed theoretically.
Public audiences are invited to participate in the Public Lecture: Celebrate, Educate, Abolish by Fadescha, Wed, 14 August, 7.30pm.
About Fadescha (New Delhi/Berlin)
Vidisha-Fadescha (they/them) is an artist, curator and cultural critic. Holding their lived experience of a radical gender, caste, race and disability, Fadescha suggests centering one’s own body and desire towards liberation. Their artistic work includes video, sound installations, text, and performance. They direct collective practices as a norm-critical pedagogy to queer hegemony.
Fadescha’s curatorial project, Party Office, is an anti-caste, anti-racist, trans-feminist, art and social, space and time that was founded in New Delhi in 2020. Through publications, grants, archives, conversations of life-lived, social gatherings, and more, they are building transnational dialogues on empathetic futures, care communities, and personal agency.
In 2024, Fadescha (for Party Office) curated the exhibition ‘Resonance Beyond Escape: Qworkaholics Anonymous III’ (June-Oct 2024, Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts), a digital curatorial ‘we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for’ (July 2024, performing borders) and were an artist at the Lagos Biennial. In 2023, Vidisha participated in projects with Prince Claus Fund Biennial Symposium (Colombo), Survival Kit 14 (Riga), Rehearsing Moves on Hazy Paths (at ZK/U Berlin), Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts (Vilnius / Nida), Kunst im Untergrund (organised by nGbK Berlin), 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Sydney), and was a lumbung artist at documenta fifteen, Kassel in 2022.
Fadescha’s work has been published in arts and cultural magazines including Frieze, Flash Art, Texte zur Kunst, Metropolis M, Hyperallergic, Mezosfera, Aperture Magazine, Art in America, Galerie, Dazed, and Vogue.
