Unknowing Painting

What happens when we shift representation from a site of controlling discourse to a site of expansive revolutionary possibility? This piece addresses this question by creating an alternative space of representation. Ontological and epistemological, this work reinterprets the shadow image by examining what happens when the lived realities of South Asian gender-nonconforming and trans peoples become the site of departure away from discourses of normativity. This work represents what arrives when we refuse normative logics over race, gender and sexuality imposed by the regimes of the settler-colonial U.S. What happens when we produce alternative realities of what could have been in order to imagine what will be? This work is aimed at engaging in imperfection as the site to be arrived at. History is imperfect violence and lived realities of my people are beyond representational capture. This work attempts to engage with these realities by presenting Pakistani American hijra Zakaria Ibrahimi (they/them/theirs), poet and activist Alok Vaid-Menon (they/them/theirs), and writer Vivek Shreya (she/her/hers) as trans guardian angels ready to embrace us as we transition into a new future. In this future, the wrongfully forgotten beauty of transness will be recognized as trans peoples’ very humanity, as trans death and all forms of racialized and gendered death cease. In a stormy environment, three figures stand before floating women, together as a group of five. A pathway to henceforth exists to the left, a guide to what will be if only we imagine. I dare you to imagine this new dance of social formations with me as we venture towards a future where the shackles of patriarchal, white supremacist, cisheteronormative settler-colonialism are over. I am waiting for the day when police are abolished and the daily oppressions we face at the hands of the settler state are stories we tell our grandchildren. This piece is a visual poem about embracing such a legacy. Will you join us?

Painting:Oil on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:116 W x 66 H x 0.3 D in

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