BENGALURU: In the last few years, conversations around gender, sexuality and the complexities within them have become increasingly mainstream, with many moving away from binary understandings of gender and sexuality. Sandbox Collective’s annual arts showcase, Gender Bender, has been platforming artistes exploring questions of gender, sexuality and body politics for a decade now, with the 10th edition of the festival set to go on till November 30 across three venues.
“Instead of just cultural institutions which are largely towards Indiranagar, we wanted to engage with smaller places, smaller neighbourhoods, so that there’s a diverse audience from the immediate neighbourhood that can access these conversations,” says festival director Prerana YSK.
The festival will feature work by artistes, filmmakers, and theatre practitioners from all over India, including a Pahsyntiew (Khasi folk tale) performance by theatre artiste Lapdiang Syiem, a sensorium exploring queerness and fungi by Mycodyke, and a talk by Berlin-based feminist performance collective She She Pop.
One of the highlights this year is a community kitchen run by members of the transgender community from Chennai. “People can bring their own ingredients, and cook together. When we cook with people, we end up sharing our lives – we speak about our day and we learn about each other – especially as strangers. So the idea is to facilitate more such conversations between diverse audiences over food,” says Prerana.
Every year, Gender Bender gives a grant to 10 artistes exploring questions of gender in different mediums, culminating in a grantee showcase. This year, the festival features two more curated exhibitions on the themes of ‘excess’ and ‘nausea’. “We’ve invited artistes across India who have an ongoing practice around body politics, from photographs to cyanotypes and paintings, it is across genres and modalities,” says Prerana. “Because the grantees come from varied contexts, their modalities are also diverse – some of them do nukkad natak (street play), somebody else does something called tech-rigged comics, which are comics that are also using technology.”
The festival has something for everyone, with two workshops – one on children’s literature and another on theatre – specially curated for kids by theatre practitioner Timira Gupta. “We grow up in a society where gender is all around us, from our parents, peers, what we see in films, images and advertisements. But never once does society give us a chance to really sit with ‘what does it do?’ Instead, we’re only consuming conversations about gender,” says Prerana.
With this year’s Gender Bender, Sandbox Collective hopes to provide a space for honest conversations about gender. Prerana elaborates, “In this day and age, where so many trans and queer activists are fighting for rights, it is a good opportunity for the audience to just be around some of these conversations without any pressure of something academic. Over art and culture, we can learn about each other, and what it really means to be gender non-conforming, trans or queer today, especially in India.”
(Gender Bender will take place at 1Shanthi Road Studio/Gallery, Shanti Nagar, and Beru Art Space, Ramamurthy Nagar, till November 24. Bangalore International Centre, Domlur, will host Gender Bender from November 27 to 30. For more information, visit sandboxcollective.org)