Queer Unschool South Asia
Application Deadline: 1 October 2024
Unschool Dates: November 16 – December 14 2024
Location: Patan, Nepal
Apply to: queerunschoolsouthasia@gmail.com

We are thrilled to invite applications for participation in Queer Unschool South Asia which is scheduled to take place in Patan (Nepal) between November 16 – December 14 2024. The program is envisioned and organised by the curator and writer Aziz Sohail with Promona Sengupta and Anshika Varma as thought partners, and generously hosted by the independent art space Kaalo.EkSeyEk, in programming collaboration with photo.circle

What is the Queer Unschool?

The Queer Unschool invites practitioners from South Asia to gather for a month in a spirit of conviviality, knowledge-sharing, and re-thinking regional imaginaries of our nation states. We centre the experiences of the participants who hail and live in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka – artists, activists and thinkers who are doing important and urgent work in their contexts. Eight participants will be selected through this open call.

The selected participants will help inform the pedagogical and learning structure by bringing their own lived experiences and thinking alongside workshops and events which will be facilitated by key feminist and queer activists and arts practitioners from South Asia. By facilitating peer-to-peer curriculum-building of localised knowledge, passions and experience, the school will also question existing models of pedagogic hierarchy. An engagement with the locality of Patan and communities based in the area will allow us to contextualise this programme on site.

We dream that the project will be an experiment in hospitality and offer an alternative infrastructure of working and thriving in the cultural sector, and allow us to imagine as if we already live in liberated, borderless, unapologetically queer South Asian equitable futures.

Why the Queer Unschool South Asia?

For those of us living in and coming from South Asia, we know the challenges facing our communities. We live amidst rising authoritarianism, ethno-fascism and violence against minorities. We live in an area with some of the most militarised border regimes in the world, preventing us from gathering and being together. We witness increasing inequality, and class/caste divided, pushing many into migration and displacement. We are aware of the climate urgency that calls for actions.

Amidst these challenges, which can prompt feelings of despair, we are heartened and strengthened by the history and presence of those who have organised and sustained our communities for a long time, including the fearless resistance movements and activists in Bangladesh, Balochistan, Sri Lanka, Kashmir and beyond, and the artists, writers, curators and change-makers who work everyday to dream and create a liveable, transformed world.

In this mode, we envision the capacity of ‘queer’ as a means of overcoming the unique socio-political challenges of our region. We centre queer as noun, verb, adjective and adverb, in order to embrace its multitudinal possibilities. Following Cuban-American queer theorist José Esteban Munoz’s groundbreaking proposal of queer as ‘a warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality’ – a utopia that can perhaps never be realised but is always possible as ‘a structuring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present’, we imagine that to be queer, to live queerly and to move queerly evokes the varied writings and imaginings of a life and worldview that question heteronormative conditions and expectations imposed upon us. Queer is also an embodiment that is against and in an uneasy entanglement with both the nation state and a globalised art world power structure.

For this school, we are grateful to be hosted by the independent art space Kaalo EkSeyEk in Patan, Nepal. Nepal is the only country in South Asia where all other South Asian passport holders can enter, visa-free, for 30 days without paying a fee. As all South Asian passport holders face acute restrictions to mobility and travel, we ask, what generative labours could we imagine if we did not have the labour of visa regimes?

What is the offer?

The school is imagined as a space of collective un-making/making and un-learning/learning.
All the participants will be hosted for one month at Kaalo.EkSeyEk in humble accommodation, which will allow them to live, cook and work together, and in due time, we hope form a sense of community. Each participant will be supported with a round trip flight from a city in South Asia and a modest per diem for the month. Some collective dinners and lunches will be organised, as will engagement with various sites in Kathmandu and outside of the valley. At the end of the programme, all participants will receive a 500 USD seed grant to further a project or an outcome in their own community, with further support from Aziz Sohail and the Queer Unschool team and wider network of facilitators.

Who is eligible?

Any self-identified emerging artist or cultural worker currently based in South Asia, with a deep commitment to organising, feminist and queer engagement and work, and a passion to connect and operate across South Asia’s borders and communities.

We welcome a diverse range of applications. Cultural workers without formal training or institutional support, and others who might not have access or support for their work are especially encouraged to apply.

How do I apply?

To apply, we ask you to send us the following to queerunschoolsouthasia@gmail.com – in a single PDF document written in English, or a single audio/video file recorded in English.

– Your Name and Preferred pronouns
– Where are you based in South Asia at the moment?
– A 200 word introduction to yourself including your background, experience, artistic or cultural practice and motivations (up to 3 minute audio/video recording)
– A 200 words on what you hope to learn from this gathering and what you hope to contribute (up to 3 minute audio recording)
– 150 words on why this is the right time for you to participate in this opportunity (up to 2 minute audio/video recording)
– 150 words roughly proposing what you hope to take back to your community and which learnings (or unlearning) you will share through the seed grant (up to 2 minute audio/video recording)

*Given the diversity of languages and cultures in South Asia, we do not have the capacity to adjudicate applications in all the languages of our region; however, we understand different capacities of second or third language English and your application will not be assessed based on the proficiency of English, but on your practice and your ideas.

Following your application, we will shortlist applications and invite a short interview to better understand each other, so we can shape this project together, before we make the final selection.

Deadline: 1 October 2024

(In our region and context of South Asia, we understand the need for flexibility, so if you feel like you are struggling to meet this deadline, do get in touch and we will do our best to accommodate you).

How are you being funded/supported?

In the spirit of Queer Unschool, we also want to undo the hegemony of funding regimes that inform much of our art work in South Asia and in general, the Global South.

For the Queer Unschool, about 50 percent of the support comes from a generous grant from Gwartler Foundation, a small artist-led foundation in Switzerland. Support is also being provided from Curatorial Practice at Monash University and Aziz is investing some of their own funds from their teaching income during their PhD. Small grants are being contributed through personal friendships and an ifa grant will support the travel of 2 Berlin-based workshop leaders.

As much as possible, we have tried to be ethical in our funding. We seek to redistribute our resources horizontally and welcome all participants into a spirit of mutual aid with a commitment towards the idea ‘from each according to their ability to each according to their needs’. This means that as a financially self-organised Unschool, we welcome those who have the ability to fundraise for themselves to chip in and help us redistribute resources amongst those without the ability and with the need. We will support all participants to the fullest of our ability, mindful of ongoing pressures and unexpected urgencies.

Acknowledgement of Doctoral Research

This Queer UnSchool is organised as part of Aziz Sohail’s Curatorial Practice PhD at Monash University, tentatively titled ‘We Cannot Cross Until We Carry Each Other: Queer Curating as Making Kin in South Asia(s) and its Diasporas’. All participants in the program and their resultant projects will be engaged as part of this process, with open discussion, honesty and collaboration.

For any further questions email: queerunschoolsouthasia@gmail.com

Aziz Sohail is a Pakistani-passport holding curator, writer and a PhD candidate in Curatorial Practice at Monash Art, Design and Architecture. Their research and resultant projects honour and recognise the power of queer and feminist collectivity, sociability, joy and wayward encounter.

At Kaalo.101 (EkSeyEk), we make revolutionary ideas accessible through art and support people to turn these ideas into actions. We are an all femme-/queer-run space that creates an entirely independent creative environment that empowers artists to make socially conscious and consciousness-raising work engaging with the physical, social, and cultural context and the communities around us.