Dolls at dusk

Wong Binghao

The closing scene of Does Your House Have Lions (2021), a 48-minute-long video by vqueeram and Vishal Jugdeo that is impossibly excerpted from over four years of footage shot in various locations across India, show vqueeram trying to film their housemate Dhiren on the rooftop of their apartment building while juggling Delhi’s fading light and Jugdeo’s attention and directions via FaceTime. There isn’t enough light on Dhiren’s face to film this vespertine panorama, the group concludes. The nascent moonlight, though coyly seductive, has a different sort of lucidity.

One of the earliest scenes of the video similarly ushers in a liminal time and space: in their apartment, vqueeram, with Dhiren’s assistance, selects apparel for an upcoming trip to Bombay. But to demarcate these scenes as the “introduction” and “conclusion” to vqueeram and Jugdeo’s video would be to counterproductively impose onto the work a temporal flow and frame and, more importantly, miss the salience of the duo’s inexorable synergy: one suffused with the intimate tension of repartee and exchange without glutting this cohabitation with saccharine redemption. Duration is difficult—a neurotic condition. In particular, to be with oneself through time is to painstakingly coax out the revulsions of truth. A stark and loveless[1] dissection that, perhaps, disentangles some beautiful, sanguine epiphanies, but ultimately will not fulfill tearful wholeness or repair. After all, vqueeram clarifies, they are “not trying to rid the world of loneliness or ugliness,” only “trying to make them more livable.”[2]

Although vqueeram and the friends they live with garner the bulk of the camera eye’s attention, Does Your House Have Lions doesn’t quite consummate the solidity, security, and structure that its titular question suggests but leaves open-ended. Jugdeo and vqueeram document, but a documentary their video is not. Those caught on camera address sex, theory, motherhood, loneliness, insecurity, caste, and politics with such pelagic largesse that the scenes of life the cameras do register almost quiver, saturated with the dark possibility of what is to (and in many ways, has already) come. Will one of their friends continue to be sexually ostracized? When will violence and incarceration stop conspiring as one reality for another group of friends? Regarding this unnerving, insidious threat of time, in another intimate gathering on their apartment’s rooftop, vqueeram surrenders[3] to Jugdeo that “there’s nothing one can do about it.” Rhetorically, they go on to lay bare the personal and political path that, for better or worse, they will continue to walk. This is a trajectory that they confessedly cannot “stop.”

Resignation or realization, protection or persecution, present or future? These are idle options. Throughout the video, vqueeram and friends self-reflexively transnationalize their theoretical and political positions, ratifying the natural proclivities and affective spread of personal idiosyncrasy. Any hope, on the viewers’ part, for the tantalizing disclosure of truth, or salvation in a star’s soliloquy, quickly dissipates.

*

Recently, I was asked what “the objective of asserting my pronouns” was. Critical reflection, not martyrdom, is the intention of this account. For while I have chosen, of late and for personal equanimity, to see in such rehearsed impositions an innocuous neutrality rather than an intrusive affront, this quizzical inquiry came as a particular surprise for two reasons. Firstly, because I do not, cannot, and have not enforced the dominance of “assertion,” which in any case does not take precedence over the volatility of experience and worldview. And most of all because of the intriguing deployment of the intention-driven “objective,” which prompted constructive thought about the direction and temporality of non-binary and trans life: What is the necessity of a “before” and an “after”? A fresh start, confident stop, triumphant accomplishment, and celebratory afterparty? The comparative radicality of queer time (as opposed to, say, heteronormative biological schedule) feels too resolved and somewhat impertinent to these curiosities. To encourage speculation, in what follows, I heed my idiosyncratic inclinations to weave together cognate threads that translate, accentuate, and converse with the “episodic” and experiential qualities of vqueeram and Jugdeo’s video.[4]

The revelation of a life’s complexities, for the imminent relief of resolution, is often met instead with the melancholia of abandonment. Post-confession, a purgatory of solitude awaits. Despite taking the supposedly liberatory steps to realizing their personal gender expression, it is not without disenchantment that artist and community organizer Tamarra recounts at times being “police[d]” and having their authenticity “questioned” by kindred spirits.[5] A sigh seems to accompany Tamarra’s refreshing honesty about the paradoxical typification of transness and gender non-conformity: “Even my closest community [in Indonesia] doesn’t understand my sexual orientation or sexual behavior.”[6] Activist Patrick Califia expresses similar feelings of displacement and inadequacy with regards to his transgender status. “Not wanting to be female,” Califia finds it equally hard to claim manliness.[7] Rather, he sees himself “stand[ing] in the middle” of a gendered spectrum, driving home the experience of transgender’s unmoored unknowability.[8]

Such is the disappointment of time. Disillusioned with gender’s future prospects, the hollowness of history’s vaults may yet prove illuminating. In a conversation convened by curator X Zhu-Nowell with fellow artists on the experiences of transgender personhood, J Fan shares that the etymology of the word “radical comes from the word root” and suggests that the oft-cited curatorial birthing of a “world order that we call radical imagination” is likely a reiteration of unsung histories, and is therefore “not that radical.”[9] Pushing the possibilities inherent in such ostensible historical chasms, art historian Simon Soon “prioritize[s] speculation” to “recover resonances that might otherwise be sidelined [or “remain tentative and hidden”] by the narrow purview of nationalism as a politically dominant discourse” in the context of Malaysian art history.[10] To dispel, in particular, “batik painting’s myth of origin” in the canonized figure of Chuah Thean Teng, Soon proposes the contemporaneous, cosmopolitan, and queer figure of Patrick Ng, whose work unsettles batik’s accepted status as a symbol of nationalism and cultural heritage.[11] In this case, historical absence paradoxically elucidates Ng’s take on batik painting, which “appear[s] muddy” in formal comparison to Chuah’s “graphic linearity” and precise “schematic.”[12]

Time’s manifold “dimensions” and “durations” enable such “otherworldly aspirations” to be elaborated and not simply “reduced to [the requisite knowability of] context,” as conceived by Patrick Flores in his 2011 exhibition Bisa: Potent Presences at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila.[13] Situated in the premise of a larger touring exhibition project that explores the concept of “Self and Other” in the cultural interactions between Asia and Europe, Flores reflexively sought to evoke, through the notion of the titular bisa, or potency, “the sensuous and the elusive simultaneously, the untranslatable attractive.”[14] Flores’ exhibition, splintering into the yearnings of four temporal tributaries, thereby accommodated the pluralistic “agency… of the self to relate to the other in a post-colonial context.”[15] The politics of choice, in this instance, promised genesis and discovery, as opposed to deleterious and deadening teleology. Perhaps it was this propulsion that led filmmaker Isabel Sandoval to “pivot… from a demonstrative “othering” of [her]self to having [her] “otherness” replace the norm to become the “self”: the “trans woman as Everywoman.”[16] Reflecting on the purposeful eccentricities of her artistic development, Sandoval fancies herself an “illusionist,” “rebel,” and seductress, keeping her audiences and characters on their toes, unable to categorically predict—but nevertheless insatiably curious to learn—her next move.[17] Sandoval relishes the fact that her oeuvre is “in constant flux.”[18] 

*

This is precisely the “opacity”—the muddiness and mutability—that vqueeram “prefer[s]…to transparency.” Indeed, in the very first scene of the video, we witness vqueeram’s repulsion toward identification, the delineation of “self” from “other,” when they initially rebuff, but eventually comply with, Jugdeo’s requests for a close-up shot of their Indian identity card, which holds personal biodata such as fingerprints and iris scans. This frame is “too obvious and too literal” for vqueeram. Ironically, they are reassured by an unseen cinematographer that this footage will not be used in the final cut. Given the tacit assumption that the video was made with complete consent and collaboration, it is interesting to ponder the artists’ rationale for leaving in a number of similarly empty disclaimers, like vqueeram’s impromptu Tina Turner impression in a plantation-style house in Goa that they say “should never make it to camera.” Uncannily, an unseen operator had clandestinely documented this event, along with Dhiren’s belated realization that they, as the assigned cameraperson, did not actually manage to record the scene at all.

A fine line seems to distinguish bona fide admission from shady secret, candor from fabrication. The multiple recording devices that are simultaneously in play throughout Does Your House Have Lions, from the personal iPhone to more elaborate technical arrangements, only exacerbates this vagueness. Moreover, we, the viewers, are repeatedly made aware of the presence of cameras and the act of recording. Crews and equipment are often plainly visible, and even at times occupy the privileged center of the frame, as in a particular tableau in a moving car when a camera pans to vqueeram in the backseat before swivelling to hone in on another cameraperson recording them from the front passenger seat. Bespectacled in black lingerie, vqueeram poses sensually in front of a laptop camera for a virtual Chatterbate audience. vqueeram, Jugdeo, Dhiren, and friends take turns playing cameraperson, operating all manner of recording devices and fluidly moving between the roles of person and personality, muse and artist. Easy enough, then, to conclude that state and gender surveillance are omnipresent and suffocating, or that there is no such thing as unmediated, authentic emotional experience in the age of social media. Or perhaps, more predictably, that the recurring mise en abymes of recording machines are devices self-reflexively employed by Jugdeo and vqueeram to comment on the constructed nature of truth, documentation, and reality that permeates media, politics, and daily life. But this last, almost narrative, inference would be too neat and conclusive. vqueeram and Jugdeo do not merely seek to critique or expose artifice, but the endlessness of that artifice. The video’s liminal, unabating temporalities and ambiguous, unresolved affects perform this infinite loop of ambivalence, conjuring in viewers’ minds a dizzying intensity.

It is in a similar spirit of adventurous continuity that vqueeram and Jugdeo describe the organic friendship, and not any one-off goal or singular project, that is at the core of their collaboration. About Spirit of Friendship, an exhibition on artist friendships and groups in Vietnam since 1975, curator Zoe Butt is clear that this specific project “is by no means comprehensive,” but is rather “conceived as the first chapter of an ongoing research project.”[19] Resonant with the manner in which vqueeram and Jugdeo describe their creative partnership, Butt not only discourses about—but more importantly deploys friendship as—a methodology in her long-term, processual, and open-ended curatorial practice. Likewise, for Jugdeo and vqueeram, friendship is past, present, and future, but not at all in abstract, theoretical ways. At the time of writing, the trials of vqueeram’s activist friends and housemates, who were arrested during the early days of the pandemic, are ongoing.[20] The scenes of political furor at Modi’s regime in the video are not, as vqueeram observes, “unique as a moment in time—we’ve been here before in India.” Dhiren’s facial and physical appearance changes drastically as the video progresses chronologically, hinting at a growing, behind-the-scenes familiarity and trust-building process with Jugdeo.[21] Perhaps, as vqueeram reminds Jugdeo in another scene on the feted rooftop—a threshold between incendiary ground and quixotic sky—viewers will always only see a selected “fragment” of their living “archive of friendship.”[22] Any anticipated pathos or emotional resolution remains unsatiated.

The writer would like to extend their sincerest gratitude to Vishal Jugdeo, vqueeram, Padma Maitland, and Patrick Flores for their conversation and acuity.

Approaching art curatorially, Wong Binghao eclectically constellates and mediates ideas, genres, scenes, and devotions. They generate contextually specific, conceptually capacious, and emotionally available readings of art in the hope of a more expansive, ethical experience of culture. They are C-MAP Asia Fellow for MoMA, NY.

End Notes

[1] Through diction, I respond to vqueeram's magnanimous assertion: “I want less value to love.”
[2] Here I also think of a later scene where Dhiren appears to relieve themselves of the burden of escaping one form of loneliness (the family), only to “enter a new register of loneliness” in Delhi.
[3] Conversation with vqueeram and Vishal Jugdeo, April 2021.
[4] Conversation with vqueeram and Vishal Jugdeo, April 2021.
[5] Tamarra interviewed by Riksa Afiaty, “To Build a Better Workspace for Us,” e-flux 117 (April 2021), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/117/386027/to-build-a-better-workspace-for-us/. Tamarra, “Hello, My Name Is Tamarra,” post: notes on art in a global context (March 2021), https://post.moma.org/hello-my-name-is-tamarra/.
[6] Tamarra, “Build.”
[7] Patrick Califia, “Manliness,” in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), 435.
[8] Califia, “Manliness,” 436.
[9] X-Zhu Nowell, “Walking with the Past in the Front: A Conversation with Jes Fan, Jota Mombaça, Iki Yos Piña Narváez, and Tuesday Smillie, Part 2,” Guggenheim.org,  https://www.guggenheim.org/blogs/checklist/conversation-with-fan-mombaca-narvaez-smillie-part-2.
[10] Simon Soon, “Fabric and the Fabrication of a Queer Narrative: The Batik Paintings of Patrick Ng Kah Onn,” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 38 (August 2015): 2, 15.
[11] Soon, “Fabric,” 2, 6, 11.
[12] Soon, “Fabric,” 6.
[13] Patrick Flores, exhibition brief for Bisa: Potent Presences. Metropolitan Museum of Manila, 2011. I sincerely thank Patrick Flores for sharing this text with me.
[14] Email correspondence with Patrick Flores, April 2021.
[15] Flores, Bisa. The four propositions of time are: Ibayo/Afterlife: visions of the future and the unknown. Ganap/Here and now: material condition and struggle with nature. Tuwina/Time and again: the demands of history, repetition, and change. Dayo/Far and away / temptation of distance? The allure of the foreign, the allegory of the native/national.
[16] Isabel Sandoval, “Seeing as the Other,” e-flux 117 (April 2021).
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Zoe Butt, Bill Nguyễn, and Lê Thiên Bảo, “Spirit of Friendship: Artist Groups in Vietnam Since 1975,” Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, 2 no. 1 (March 2018): 147.
[20] On June 17, 2021, more than a year after their initial arrest and imprisonment, Devangana Kalita, Natasha Narwal, and Asif Iqbal Tanha were granted bail. A day after, the Delhi Police challenged the bail order in a petition filed before the Supreme Court. For more information, see Nalini Sharma, “Delhi Police Moves SC Challenging Bail to Devangana Kalita, Natasha Narwal in Riot Case,” India Today, June 16, 2021, https://www.indiatoday.in/cities/delhi/story/delhi-police-sc-challenging-bail-devangana-kalita-natasha-narwal-riot-case-1815477-2021-06-16 and Shinjini Ghosh, “We Were Always Hopeful That Justice Will Prevail through Judicial System, the Rising Voices of Protest: Devangana Kalita,” The Hindu, June 20, 2021, https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/devangana-kalita-interview-we-were-always-hopeful-that-justice-will-prevail-through-judicial-system-the-rising-voices-of-protest/article34863475.ece%20and.
[21] Conversation with vqueeram and Vishal Jugdeo, April 2021.
[22] https://www.moca.org/program/screen-does-your-house-have-lions

Published Summer, 2021