Sculpting Queer Futures for Survival: Jaishri Abichandani’s Everyday Deities

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.