Theatre Journal

Abstract:

Working in photography, sculpture, mixed media portraiture, and protest performance, New York-based artist Jaishri Abichandani archives her feminist, queer, and trans South Asian community. In her early work, she photographed drag artists and genderqueer performers at desi parties in the early 2000s, and in a series of ongoing portraits titled Jasmine Blooms at Night she paints tributary portraits of South Asian cultural and political workers (artists, activists, academics, and public figures). In a series of small interactive sculptures, she captures the sartorial and gestural language of feminist protests in the 2017 US #MeToo movement and 2019 occupation of Delhi’s Shaheen Bhag. Jaishri regularly invents goddess forms, amalgamated from a range of geographies and spiritual traditions, to birth queerer and more capacious futures. She centers sexuality, sensation, and excess through iridescent paints; employs intricate mirrored, embroidered, and rhinestoned embellishments; and includes whips, feathers, and dildos. Her invocation of the sacred not only turns everyday subjects into saintly figures, but she also uses these mythic themes to manifest the endurance of patriarchal violence. She critiques expansions of US empire and Hindu fundamentalism; she also sculpts someone who raped her.

Jaishri has been formative to my path toward becoming a scholar and artist. Certainly, her vibrant aesthetic and community mentorship have shaped the auntyness I perform in my drag. But her influence runs even deeper. The first queer South Asian performers I ever witnessed, at age 18, were D’Lo and YaliniDream who were curated into a gallery opening for SAWCC [South Asian Women’s Creative Collective], which Jaishri founded. D’Lo and YaliniDream also feature in Jaishri’s series Jasmine Blooms at Night. Several years later, my first dip into the art world in 2008 involved, at the recommendation of a senior colleague, bringing Jaishri to exhibit a small set of works at Williams College when I worked there. In 2017, Jaishri included my performance work into her retrospective of South Asian American art, and she then created sculpture of that performance. This interview is a testament then, not only to her expansive body of work, but also the generosity of her practice.