Public Lecture: Celebrate, Educate, Abolish by Fadescha
Details
Wed, 14 August 2024, 7.30pm
@72-13, Home of T:>Works
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“Some of us who grow up with an experience of being outcasted can’t discern if it was because of our gender, caste, neuro-divergence or our desires; and all of these intersections are then our queerness.” — Fadescha, 2022
In this multimedia presentation, Fadescha takes us through their transdisciplinary practice grounded in Queer Anarchist politics, and the intersectionality of caste-based subjugation. Caste is a system of exclusion and untouchability that ranks people at birth into a hierarchy based on alleged purity and pollution.
Fadescha finds voice through curatorial, artistic and theoretical making. They organise, and propose rest, parties and social gatherings as sites and tools for resisting the patriarchal, fascist and neo-liberal order. Fadescha through their curatorial project Party Office have been publishing works centring lived experiences of those structurally marginalised, producing counter archives through self-representation.
Fadescha hopes we abolish various systems of assimilation that become tools of oppression including gender, borders, caste, ability, ethnicity and race; not only structurally on the streets and institutions but also within our colonised minds and at our homes.
Celebrate, Educate, Abolish emerges from the call to action made by the Anti-Caste polymath of India Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s “Educate, Agitate, Organise”* for annihilation of caste towards equality, freedom, justice and liberty.
This Public Lecture is part of Module #2: Queer Labour by Fadescha.
*All India Depressed Classes conference in July 1942 in Nagpur, India
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.
