Are you keen to understand and think deeply about the relationship between art and gender? How do different art forms help us identify, articulate and express issues close to our hearts and convey the complex experiences of caste, religion, dis/ability, sexuality, conflict and more? How do we create works that speak of our individual and collective realities?

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reFrame offers just the space in which to get familiar with understanding and interpreting art and artistic practices. This is a series of art appreciation workshops, with three specific artforms at their core, through which we will look at issues of gendered lives and living and how they can be expressed. Focussing on digital performances, writing and mixed media work, the workshops will deconstruct various artworks to think about their fundamental elements/ constituents/ qualities and how they frame diverse concerns and issues, while offering a broad framework to employ while engaging with art as both tool and outcome.

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Elements:

Gender and Digital Performance: When technology becomes part of the performance.

Gender and Writing: When we imagine and write out our worlds.
Gender and Mixed Media Art: When anything becomes a medium to create art.

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Objectives of the Workshop

 

The central idea of the workshops is to explore and engage with the idea of using art for the articulation of political visions and lived realities, as well as a means of generating dialogue and fostering social change, with a focus on gender and its diverse and complex intersections.

 

The Workshop will help participants

1. Discover digital performance, writing and mixed media as ways of articulating, confronting or exposing issues that concern us, and our alternative imaginations of the world.

2. Identify and reflect on diverse possibilities of creative expression and construction.

3. Think about tools to understand and unpack artworks to engage with what they communicate, how and why, and the larger context in which they are created and exhibited.

4. Experiment with expressing themselves in any/all of the art forms of the workshops.

 

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The Workshop Design

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The workshops are planned as interactive sessions designed to speak through, learn from and help understand/appreciate works of art created by various artists of multiple locations and gender identities. Using diverse art works across each art form as the primary pedagogical materials, the workshops will help participants unravel and understand questions around gender, the making of art and creative choices employed in expressing oneself.

 

 

Resource Team

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The workshops will be conducted by members of reFrame, a Delhi based initiative that produces, mentors and disseminates artistic efforts that respond to contemporary social and political challenges. 

 

Vani Subramanian, feminist activist, documentary filmmaker and mixed media artist.

Tulika Srivastava, feminist documentary film commissioner, mentor and programmer.

Ridhima Mehra, feminist documentary film commissioner, mentor and programmer. 

Neeharika Sreedhar, researcher and designer.

 

Shals Mahajan is a writer, activist, layabout, part feline, somewhat hooman, genderqueer fellow who lives in Bombay, but mainly in their head. They have worked on issues of gender, sexuality, caste and communalism as a trainer, teacher and activist, and enjoy conducting workshops on writing with university students, folx working on social justice issues, women returning to literacy, and queer and trans persons. They are the author of several children’s books including Reva and Prisha, Timmi in Tangles, and Timmi and Rizu, and have co-authored No Outlaws in the Gender Galaxy.

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Profile of Participants 

 

The Gender. Kala. Aur Hum. workshops are open to all who are interested in creating and using art for social change. Participants could include those involved in social movements, political/cultural organisations and societies, students and trainers. Those with a basic understanding of, or at least a definitive interest in understanding gender and its intersectionalities, will be given preference.

 

 

Number of Participants 

20 - 25

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Duration

Four days

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Medium of Instruction

English and Hindi

Cost of the workshop, including food, stay and accommodation

Individual:6000

Institutional: 8000

 

 

Participant Contribution

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We hope that participants would contribute the amount towards workshop expenses, inclusive of all on-site workshop costs: boarding, lodging, and all the materials used in the workshop. Travel of participants will have to be borne by the organisation/the participants.

 

 

Do not let money be an impediment to your application. Need-based partial fee waivers are available. We have a limited number of scholarships so please apply for a waiver if you really need it. Do remember that there may be others who need it more than you. The partial fee waivers will be offered to people from marginalised groups and non-funded social, political or student movements.

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Click here to apply.

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reFrame is an initiative that produces, mentors and disseminates artistic efforts that respond to contemporary social and political challenges. 

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At a time when space for free thinking and expression in India is diminishing dramatically, reFrame aims to set in motion an opposing dynamic: of expanding the ambit of creative work, with the making of connected but distinct creative outputs that we hope will complement, complicate and energise each other. Celebrating the collective energies of diverse art/s and artists, we activate dialogues across disciplines, platforms and practices. We facilitate deliberations on critical social questions and carry forward public culture projects, pedagogical initiatives, festivals and other interactive programmes that strengthen the voices of independent art and artists of our times. 

 

Sambhaavnaa is an alternative learning and living space for those concerned with social and political change. 

 

At Sambhaavnaa, a significant part of our work on gender justice in our training programmes and workshops such as Buland Irade focuses on understanding  power, patriarchy, masculinity and constitutional rights. Hence training in art based political expression through workshops such as Gender, Kala Aur Hum aligns perfectly with our vision of working towards social justice and gender equality through multiple and diverse means. 

 

For more info, see www.sambhaavnaa.org

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