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. 1 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.
Kareem Khubchandani (KK):
Jaishri, I have been marveling at these major milestones that you have had over the last few years, curatorial projects like Fatal Love at the Queen Museum and Asia Society in 2017, and Radical Love and Utopian Imagination at the Ford Gallery in 2019, and also a mid-career survey at LA’s Craft Contemporary titled Flower Headed Children. It means the world to me to see the kind of recognition you’re getting and the celebration of yourself alongside the space you make for others. Can you tell us a little bit about the journey towards becoming a full time artist, tracing how you’ve arrived at these recent celebratory exhibitions?
Jaishri Abichandani (JA):
You first knew me as a photographer in the New York South Asian community. My practice began with making photographs. The impulse to make work about, with, and within the community has always been part of my practice. When I was 22, I encountered Sakhi [an organization addressing South Asian survivors of sexual and domestic violence] and SALGA [South Asian Lesbian Gay Association] at the annual India Day Parade, when I was with Rekha [referring to DJ Rekha]—Rekha and I went to Queens College New York together. We were amongst the few people who wanted a feminist activist life unlike some of our peers who were happy to be accountants, doctors, lawyers, engineers and bureaucrats--all of those very traditional roles that our parents wanted us to occupy. It was transformative to find this community of feminists at 22, to find queer community. It allowed me to develop my artistic voice and social practice with amazing mentors and peers.
In 1997 I started SAWCC [South Asian Women’s Creative Collective] because at that point there were no arts-based organizations for South Asians—they were all purely based on social justice. I had been inspired by Desh Pardesh [a Toronto-based South Asian arts festival] like a whole bunch of BIWOC collectives across the US. Related to being raped by Raghubir Singh,2 I really wanted SAWCC to be a safe space for women to develop their voice, but also a space where we could critique and engage the amazing cultural production of that moment: Karma Sutra (Mira Nair, 1996), Mississippi Masala (Mira Nair, 1991), Bhaji on the Beach (Gurinder Chadha, 1993), Cereus Blooms at Night (Shani Mootoo, 1996), [and the work of author] Chitra Devakurni Banerjee. There needed to be a space for us to gather and absorb and create. Through SAWCC, I was always in community with fantastically fierce and genius artists and makers. As someone who was an immigrant and went to public universities, I didn’t have access to the knowledge base, resources, and social circles that these folks were mingling in. Being around folks who came from such different diasporic, class, and caste backgrounds allowed me to access things that I never would have been able to access coming from my own working class, immigrant, Queens background.
During my MFA, the practice was challenged by my tutors. They were like, “Look, photography can’t really do what you want it to do.” I needed to have a tactile engagement with materials, and the practice slowly evolved. My paintings and sculptures are often of the same folks in the community that I was photographing, but they just take on different formal ways of expressing themselves. I think about the making. But then I’m also able to look at the activity of the community and the ways in which we produce it in order to organize it into information that can be passed on or broken down into ways that are understood. For example, I’ve noticed that the strategies of resistance that our BIPOC communities often use include making socially engaged artworks or social practice. Or writing about the work of other BIWOC artists. Or intervening within institutions. Or creating new institutions. And some of us use all of these strategies in combination, attempting to bring equity within systems like education and the art world that are, frankly, so hierarchical.
KK:
It strikes me that you are doing ethnography through your artwork, documenting and re-presenting your community, and thereby reconstituting the very community that you’re part of. In your work, there are all these themes of community, love, pleasure, flowering. But then there’s the undercurrent of violence, violence against women, gender non-conforming folks. In 2007, when we worked together to curate a small show at Williams College, where I was working, you were focused on images of warfare. There you were working with discursive images, and not necessarily themes in the community. Where did those images came from, and how do you enter that global conversation, given your relationship to community-based work?
JA:
The works that I showed there at Williams College had come out of an exhibition I participated in at MoMA PS1 called Emergency Room (2007), where we were asked to respond very directly to what was in the news that particular day and create artwork every single day [Figure 1]. And so a lot of the work was about war, because the US was in that [Iraq] war. That exhibition and translating those world events into artwork is what led to me making what I make now. A lot of the ways in which I was using those images and information, I now do it through sculpture as opposed to those images themselves. There becomes a mythological filter that gets applied to the politics to render it into a more eternal space.
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manifestering destiny (conde), acrylic, Swarovski on canvas (10” diameter), 2008. Acquired by the Burger Collection. Image courtesy of artist.
KK:
Some of that is evident in the use of the goddess in your work. Can you talk about that shift to sculpture and pantheon of the goddess? And how do you imagine all these different figures that carry such mythic longevity, holding violence at the same time as they birth other kinds of futures?
JA:
I think it was completely inevitable. The first object that I made was to turn the camera itself into a tiny little temple, a little retablo. Having been raised in India around the Ajanta Ellora caves, that was my first reference to art, that is what’s been imprinted within me so deeply. Almost everything I make comes out looking like that. Initially, it started with the little camera sculptures. Those turned into little lingams3 made out of dildos and whips. Then the whips released themselves from the dildos and became wall drawings. They started to get incorporated into the head pieces of goddesses that I was making from found objects. I found these two Buddha heads in a Costco parking lot in Queens, and I turned the Buddha into Kali with the blue and gave it a tongue. I was thinking a lot about my own desire for peace. But also having to be a warrior because of my position as a feminist killjoy in rape culture. I still am so drawn to Buddha, even though he’s a patriarchal thing. But I will make the goddess, because that is who I am.
I was obsessed with this form of the birthing goddess. I had seen it in the Mohenjodaro Indus Valley artifacts, and went digging for what is called the Lajjagowri, which is a lotus-headed goddess in birthing position. I found her in a seal. But then what I also found were these amazing artifacts. They were feminine figures, and none of them had legs, and they ended in this tapered form that looks like a vulva. I can only tell you as a fellow Sindhi [our shared ethnic heritage] what an ancestral calling I felt to like remake those objects. What is this beautiful, sacred, mysterious, feminine, feminist thing? And how is it that I can connect to this? And so I made a 108 of them. That is where I taught myself to sculpt from scratch; I no longer need to rely on the right found object to render the form. I pushed the clay beyond its capacity, and they would disintegrate, and museums would be like, “Oh, we can’t actually buy them, because we can’t guarantee that we can keep them alive.”
I was forced to seek other materials. It was Sheila Pepe, the legendary lesbian sculptor, who led me to epoxy. That led me to where I am now, making the deities that we want to see, the queer ones, the feminist ones, the fierce ones. The ones that embody all of the emotions that women feel that male sculptors won’t even deign to sculpt or understand. We come from a culture where it is the men who render the goddess, and her form is so prescribed, and it has been for centuries. And so to fuck with that is the greatest joy that I can have. To render her menopausal, bleeding, cutting, emotional, sacrificial mother--all of these things that men won’t know or touch. That’s the space I’m in.
KK:
I know that you’re very attuned to caste critique and the violence of Brahminism and Hindu supremacy. But of course you work with images and shapes that look like Hindu goddesses, while also drawing on ancient figures as well. I was wondering how you think about the goddess beyond the prescriptive Hindu form?
JA:
You see that work on the wall? That’s called Shrine to the Abortion Goddess and the primary aesthetic influence for that work is an African reliquary sculpture that my in-laws own from the Ivory Coast [Figure 2]. I fell in love with that form, and I did all the research on that form, and then improvised on it, changed it, included South Asian Indian and Hindu influences, and made it my own.
The one here that I’m working on right now, you can see the top part of it clearly mimics East Asian and Buddhist sculptural traditions. And the actual form of it is taken from a Mexican retablo, which is Catholic infused with Indigenous Mexican aesthetics. Within it I’m placing these quasi Hindu-looking goddesses. There’s also the goddess on the top, because of her skin color she could be read as black. I feel like there is a place in folk and craft art where the goddess exists in so many different forms, and they meet somewhere. That’s where I’m trying to reach her from.
What’s joyful for me is when I made this one, The Alchemist, which is about Dr. Anantha Sudhakar4 [Figure 3]. Thenmozi Soundarajan [a well-known Dalit activist and writer] loved it so much that she wants me to work with her to create Dalit archetypal sculptures and goddesses. When I’m working on that one about my mother, Yashica Dutta [Dalit author and journalist] is in the studio with me as I’m working on the making with her and understanding all of the mythology that I’m subverting within the sculpture: turning Shiva into a woman, placing Indra’s eyes and vulvas on to the body. There are so many different Hindu mythological stories that I’m totally eviscerating. I think that that’s where Dalit women find the joy in it, is in that evisceration, along with the fact that within the queer gods and goddesses I’m making permit a feeling of love and a devotion. It isn’t only like Thenmozi or Yashica; this is something that Christina Dhanraj express as well--she was raised Christian within the Dalit Christian tradition. So there’s a way in which the sculptures that I’m making allow them to enter a space that they are not allowed within, and to be a full participant in it.
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shrine to the abortion goddess (11 feet x 8 feet x 20”), 2021. The number of figures corresponds to the artist’s own abortions, and the figures are traced for her child and husband. Image courtesy of artist.
KK:
ln addition to the goddesses, you have so many other kinds of sculptures, including drag queens, the #MeToo angry ladies, Shaheen Bhag protestors. But I remember at the Flower Headed Children exhibition, beside the Angry Ladies was a sculpture of Raghubir Singh. It’s an outlier to a lot of your sculpture work. You mentioned earlier that you were raped by him. Can you talk a little bit about what it meant to make that sculpture, and then also organize embodied protests against the exhibition of his work?
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The Alchemist (for Anantha), 2021. Image courtesy of artist.
JA:
I didn’t understand what happened between Raghubir and me to be rape until Harvey Weinstein happened. I saw the parallels between how his assistants and his colleagues had enabled the predation, and that was exactly what had happened with Raghubir. I had been introduced to him within a progressive South Asian community space, at a friend’s home. I became aware of how he had maneuvered the situation for me to be with him in Kerala, completely isolated from my support networks, from having financial access. He had arranged for my tickets and my hotel stays. This is in 1995, pre-ATMs and cell phones, which are some of the ways in which women who have access to enough resources can get out of such situations [today].
As someone who is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, I had been trained to accommodate rape culture. I was frozen in confusion, in fear, not being able to understand that this was actually happening. After the trip ended, he continued to be verbally aggressive and abusive to me for as long as we were in touch, and I was terrified of him. I would take friends along every time I would see him, and there was a time he had come over to my parents’ home with his other predator friend, Thomas Roma, who was the head of photography at Columbia and Cooper Union, and they would just battle, all of us. It was just like this pack of wolves, predators who ran together. I was 25 and terrified.
He’d been dead a long time [since 1999], and I felt safety enough in that to finally speak up. That’s why I did the protest, because I felt like I would burst if I didn’t let the world know what a fucking horrible human being he was. The experience of being around him those few weeks was horrible. I remember writing in my diary about the ways he treated everyone around him with complete contempt, like we were all there to service his fucking genius. He was of royal blood, and he took great pride in that; he was the worst of toxic Indian patriarchy, brahminical supremacy. And when I did the protest, I got permission from Tarana Burke to use #MeToo, because hers was one of the first protests where the hashtag was being used, and I wanted to be intentional about getting her permission. I checked with lawyers to make sure that folks would not be endangered. And then the Museum got wind, because I was talking about it publicly. And so Sandra Dumont Jackson [Chairman of Education at The Met] reached out to me from the museum to say that they would support the protest, and not get in the way. She gave me the guidelines of what they allowed in the galleries. And so we made sure that our signage was correct. [Figure 4]
The protest was silent, and we had gags on our mouths that said #Metoo, because I felt very strongly that we didn’t really owe anyone our stories when we were standing there. It was going to be scary enough to stand there without having to speak about what was happening. That hour and a half was one of the most intense and terrifying and beautiful of my life. The thirty folks that came and stood with me, I will never forget their gesture of solidarity. The responses to us were so intense from people who must have known him coming to see the exhibition, getting into rageful arguments with those of us who chose to speak. There were others who would yell out the window as they drove by, “Me too! Me too!” or gangs of teenage boys on bikes who would ride by and raise their fists in solidarity. It was really crazy, from the rage to the antagonism to the solidarity. After the hour ended, I hugged every single person who participated to thank them, and so many of them just cried because they were there for themselves too.
The sculpture came out of having to reread my diaries from that time, and photograph those pages to provide evidence to the journalists that this had happened. There was a memory in there that I had written about him sleeping. I had written about his enormous fucking balls and how disgusting he was, and how I wanted to spit on him as he lay there sleeping. And so the sculpture was made out of that memory of rage and revulsion. It was really weird making it. But I had to get him out of my system. Who else has sculpted their rapist? I had to show him to the world for what I remembered him to be. It’s a little sculpture. But you know, when Thenmozi saw it she was like, “Jay, I want to take a hammer and smash it.” That’s the kind of feelings that it evokes in spite of its size.
KK:
I really appreciate that you asked Tarana Burke for her permission. Clearly the process was intentional, and I want to ask you about what it means to organize the protest. In that I want to recognize that you did work to bring people together, so that they, too, could have their own catharsis. But what did it take, in this act of getting him out of your system, what did it mean to bring people together at the same time?
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Me Too at the MET Breuer, 2017. Image courtesy of artist.
JA:
It was all our community that held me. Anuradha Bhagwati called me up and said, “What do you need from me?” My partner said to me, “What do you need from me?” Swati Khurana letter pressed the #MeToo signs to match the Freedom Safety Now signs she had pressed. Fariba Alam made #MeToo gags. And Imani Uzuri stood next to me the whole time. I had my tallest, strongest, fierce-as-fuck friends next to me. I had told Richard that I needed him to hold my hand the whole time, so I could have a loving touch that reminded me that I was safe. I squeezed his hand nearly to death in those 2 hours. But it was really our friends who held me in the organizing. Aleyamma Mathew who put me in touch with Tarana Burke. And Chaumtoli Huq coming through. And also me thinking about Chaumtoli’s arrest to make sure that when she came that she would not be arrested again.5 I had been referred to lawyers through our community, who said, “This is what you can safely say without his estate or the museum suing you.” So my sign said “I survived Raghubir Singh, #MeToo”--that wording was upon the suggestion of the lawyers. It was organizing work, but it was something that our community is so good and so practiced and resourceful with. It happened out of 20 years of us doing this together.
KK:
So much of what we’ve talked about so far is how your work critiques different forms of patriarchy: individual, structural, discursive. One of the ways that you’ve done that is this sculpture that I’m obsessed with, called Kamala’s [Harris] Inheritance, that stages histories of US and Hindu-Indian empire that this Black South Asian surveillance-state cop VP has to embody. Can you tell us a little bit about how you’ve arrived at this like critique of empire at the same time as individuals, and how you go about putting it into sculptural form? [Figure 5]
JA:
So that Lajjagowri goddess I mentioned with the splayed birthing legs and the lotus head, I made her so many times in the Before Kali series. Working on that series I thought a lot about how the BJP [Bharatiya Janta Party] had co-opted the lotus, which was a form that had been used all over South Asia for millennia in Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic architecture and art. I thought about the Not in our Name protests.6 She hangs her head in shame, this lotus-headed one, because in her name are all of these genocidal atrocities, in the name of Hinduism. Her body becomes blue, like the blue of Kali. And the skulls of Kali become the skulls of the violence of Hindu nationalism. In the body of the eagle, the blue of the gods becomes the blue of the American flag. The stars of the American flag are studded on the body of the eagle. The eagle has a fractured right wing, in fact, a broken, bleeding, right wing, because that is the country that she inherited. As the eagle, she is so rooted in this American Imperialist identity.
When you put the eagle and the lotus together, it really becomes Kamala’s legacy, her belief in this imperialism, her failure to call out Hindu fascism, her complicity in it. She talks about her grandfather being a freedom fighter, but not once does she acknowledge her Tamil Brahmin caste privilege, or ever support the work of Dalit activists. There’s a deliberate erasure. That’s how all of those mythological and socio-political tales, ideas, stories, get mashed into these forms. I’m using the language of mythology to talk about sociopolitical things or climate crisis. It renders these contemporary issues an eternal thing, because unless we focus on social change, these things will repeat themselves. So they’re as much talking to the future as a kind of warning.
KK:
You mentioned this briefly, but your use of the lotus and the eagle gestures towards eco-criticism, the deployment of nature toward empire. The wounded eagle, the drooping lotus become the consequence of privilege and entitlement, where brahminical supremacy and white supremacy really come together.
One of the reasons that we’re in conversation is because Sean [Metzger] saw a picture of me on your website when he was looking up your work. When I posted this picture posed in front of your sculpture, you were really excited by it. What happens for you when you see people step into the work in that way?
JA:
In those moments, I feel like I’m doing what I needed to do. I want you all to touch the work and interact with it and pose with it, activate it. Like when you place the eyes on the idol, and that’s when it’s activated. When it is your eyes that fall on it and your body that responds to it, that’s when my sculpture gets activated. Yeah, so I fucking live for it.
KK:
The sculpture really did call for me to be on the floor with it, because the figures were already kneeling; it tells you what to do with your body. But then you surprised me, saying “I want to paint you” and you made this ginormous image of me and Masala Sapphire and Lal Batti, other South Asian drag artists—this is the cover image for this journal issue. It incorporates whips and rhinestones and feathers, and dildos. I know it’s one of your most recent works. Can you tell me about where your work is going, and where this portrait of drag artists fits in with it?
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Kamala’s Inheritance, wire, foil, epoxy, paint, fabric, polymer clay, 2021. Image courtesy of artist.
JA:
It’s on show right now, and by the way, people really love it. The curators tell me “Everybody wants to touch your work.” It takes viewers ten minutes to figure out, “Is that a whip? Is that a dildo?” I’ve been doing all these portraits of South Asian feminists in Jasmine Blooms at Night. And I’d been photographing the drag community 15 years ago here locally and so enmeshed with them for like 20 plus years [Figure 6]. And those turn into sculptures. But then I didn’t just want to sculpt y’all. I want to make it in every possible medium! And when you told me about that image being from the tenth anniversary of the queer Bollywood night you started in Chicago, and how meaningful it was in that particular context, it seemed like a no brainer to make. It was such joyful work to make that painting and to be able to give it everything that my hyper feminine self wants and loves. It’s like indulging in all of my favorite vices all at once. It was such pure pleasure.
KK:
I love your use of the word vice, reclaiming vice as beauty, pleasure, and femme indulgence that is so often policed by patriarchy. I’m very honored to be in your work, in multiple of your works, and grateful that you sat down to talk to me.
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Ahmal, 2004. From the series “One Night in New York.” Image courtesy of artist.