desbianherstory:topcat77:Shahzia SikanderPromiscuous Intimacies, 2020patinated bronze “The tit
desbianherstory:topcat77:Shahzia SikanderPromiscuous Intimacies, 2020patinated bronze “The title of the work, Promiscuous Intimacies, is taken from an upcoming essay on my work by Gayatri Gopinath, the scholar, professor, and director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University. In engaging with Gayatri Gopinath, I found her definition and elaboration of “the aesthetic practices of queer diaspora” pertinent to my work in how it “deviates from straight lines of hetero- and homo-normative scripts, patrilineal underpinnings of conventional articulations of diaspora and nation.” The notions of “home” and authentic state are embedded within my practice but not in any definitive ideology, nationalism, or geography. The multiple juxtapositions, unexpected detours, dissonance, jostling, and shifting hierarchies are strategies I have employed in my work since the mid-’90s to destabilize and explode binary thinking in all its forms. The non-binary gender identity is layered in my work, and it is particularly heightened in this sculpture.Much of my work’s engagement with tradition and representation deals with both non-normative gender embodiments and sexual desires. Such alternate way of seeing, as precisely articulated by Gopinath, “a queer optic,” is about the desire to juxtapose and bring to the fore the “promiscuous intimacies of multiple times, spaces, art historical traditions, bodies, desires, and subjectivities; it allows us to glimpse other worlds not tethered to the here and now of gender and sexual normativity.” [x] The two female protagonists are modelled on the goddess in Bronzino’s, An Allegory with Venus and Cupid and an Indian Devata figure in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. [x] -- source link
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