Manjot Kaur
(b. 1989)
Manjot Kaur’s works are intimate worlds encompassing the anthropology of wonder and awe, proposing narratives that imagine a multi-species future. Hybrid Beings generate hope and care to cultivate the capacity to reimagine a future for the marginalized and silenced. To imagine forms of relationality and mutuality these paintings invoke romantic relationships between birds and women – selected heroines who belong to the Ashta-Nayika [Natyashastra, c. 2nd B.C]: a collective term for eight heroines, each of whom represents different states in relationship to her hero. In each painting, the face of Nayika is metamorphosed with her lover’s face resulting in hybrid beings. Hybrid Beings postulate a queer ecology where the endangered bird becomes the hero, replacing the male figure from the context of Ashta-Nayika. They stitch together improbable collaborations in a multispecies world making way for kinship & responding to ecological grief and loneliness. These hybrid beings open up possibilities for a post-queer and post-human world where species move towards an uncanny kind of becoming.
Manjot graduated from the Government College of Art, Chandigarh. Recently, Manjot was a Visiting Artist Fellow at “The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute” at Harvard University, Cambridge, USA in March – April 2023. She received the “Generator Art Production Fund” grant from Experimenter Gallery, India in 2022. She was chosen by Hindustan Times as one of the Top 30-under-30 young achievers (2017). Her recent participations include Delhi Contemporary Art Week with LATITUDE 28, Bikaner House, New Delhi (2023); India Art Fair with LATITUDE 28, New Delhi (2023); ‘Where Shall We Plant The Placenta’, A Tale of A Tub, Rotterdam (2022); ‘The World Awaits You Like a Garden’, conceptualised by Sugata Ray, with LATITUDE 28, New Delhi (2022); ‘The Pool of Memories’, Surrey Art Gallery, Canada (2022); ‘Hurting and Healing – Let’s Imagine a Different Heritage’, Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, (2022) and ‘Garden State’, Garage Rotterdam, Rotterdam, Netherlands (2021) among others.
