Project Overview
Queer childhoods is a media, research and archival project in which through facilitating readings and conversations over childhood photographs in family albums of queer individuals, I am building an open media archive. I have also created a photographic performance that gives a curated glimpse into its concerns and conversations: https://drive.google.com/open?id=15wFfaK5C5TqS8uJOSW5DgV32kVs2kWs1 By prioritising the agency of the adult queer individual in rereading these photographs, facilitating a queer gaze into one’s own past and ‘listening’ to the photograph beyond seeing, the project complicates notions of visuality. It approaches images through listening and orality in order to attune to the silences and ghostly spectres that may not be visible 'inside' the image but are there in the individual's imaginary. The project began from a very personal place and through conversations initiated through my own childhood photographs.
Expected Impact
I believe that imbricated in the ‘record’ of childhood photographs are embedded silences, ghostly spectres of uncaptured subjectivities, and non-existent photographs. Therefore, the project aims to read the photographic images beyond their representation. I am concerned not just with the photographic images that exist for us to see but with the absent images that we cannot see– photographs that we can only listen to. The broader impetus of the project, ‘queer childhoods’ is evocative in its title where ‘queer’ serves both as an adjective and a verb. The aim is to queer childhood in a manner that questions the hegemonic position of the hetero-normative conception of childhood. Instead of situating ‘queer’ as a marginal identity in relation to ‘normal’ childhood, the idea is to show queerness as being an inherent characteristic of childhood that gets marginalized and suppressed within the confines of the heteronormative home.
Applicant Background
I am an artist-researcher working primarily with image-making practices. My practice spans across various methodologies, research disciplines and mediums including photography & audiovisual forms to new media and cultural studies, with a focus on queering the divisions and boundaries between artistic, archival and research practice.