Secret Trysts and Absent Presences

A group show focuses on the politics and poetics of queer belonging and un-belonging, intimates Lajja Shah.

- Lajja Shah

Hosted by Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, from the 11th of March to the 31st of July, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous sets up an inter-generational dialogue between three London-based artists whose works address the centrality of place as a physical, social and metaphorical locus for the production of queer intimacies.

Featuring photographs by Sunil Gupta, sculptures by Prem Sahib and paintings by Jake Grewal, the show, titled after a novel by Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong, illuminates the transient yet intense nature of desire as experienced by bodies that are marked by gender and colour. The works, though disparate in terms of their aesthetic strategies, are linked by diasporic contexts and shared solidarities that generate affective resonances across space and time.

Blurring the line between landscape and portraiture, Grewal’s oil on canvases are shrouded in ambiguity. His sensual, brown bodied, nude male figures seem, at once, to be rooted and suspended in pastoral settings that are a cross between a Rousseau-esque jungle scape and an idyllic haven; a mythical safe space, as much for quiet reflections and secret trysts as for the expression of vulnerabilities and desires. In Some Woven Complex, a gentle, almost tentative coupling is implied through an amorphous, shadowy rendering where the figures appear to meld into each other and with their surroundings, while in Hunted Sunset // A