Apart from being subjects in works of art, queering can be art made by people identifying within the LGBTQ+ spectrum. The Aravani Art Project is a collective that has been working with street art since 2012. The work they do essentially brings the transgender community together in a creative pursuit. Beginning as a collective that works in neighbourhoods, connecting transgender people to other communities, The Aravani Art Project has become a signifier for street art in Bangalore, positioning itself as a space that provides skilled resources for street art projects. One of the aims of the collective is to reclaim the street and raise community awareness of public spaces. The public is where the transgender body performs its queerness This is symbolic space as the street is where the bodies of transgender identifying people are subjected to violence, harassment, social negligence and pressure.

Making art as a collaborative effort, specifically in the context of gender, can help unpack the politics of exclusion that the queer-identified body goes through.

Artists who work towards queering their work are essentially defying conventional ideas of ‘making’. One can see queering as resistance and therefore a leitmotif in the larger canvas of global contemporary art practice. That the queer body is problematic/disruptive/feared is something that artists should exploit. Queer activism in India has used performance and other art forms to locate the struggle of the South Asian queer body. But how does this differ from the global perception, or a Western perception of the queer body? Where does it actually begin to reflect an Indian experience of being queer? These are of course larger questions and may not be in the scope of this discussion, but we can begin by looking at art practice that has been queered to see how a narrative emerges.

Performing queerness is also about a desire for different possibilities of bodies; a desire to dress differently, a desire to not ‘fit in’. The mark of being queer is not just in the flamboyant expression of it, but in owning your self-identified gender and sexuality, and a deep belief in what has created this identity. The desire to be seen as these identities or to make people aware of these identities is what performance is trying to do. The most important point at this time is distinguishing between what is deemed criminal, and where the moral grounds for dismissing queer as a lifestyle comes from. The largest problem the queer community faces is the violence met with being queer and owning a sexual identity.

Sharanya Ramprakash, a Bangalore-based theatre actor and director who is one of the founders of the English language theatre troupe called Dramatist Anonymous (Dramanon), has developed a play that interrogates the way the Yakshagana is performed in her work Akshayambara. Yakshagana is a traditional theatre form that combines dance, music, dialogue, costume, make-up, and stage techniques with a unique style and form. This theatre style is mainly found in Tulunadu and the Malenadu region of Karnataka, India. Yakshagana is traditionally presented from dusk to dawn. I am of the opinion that this work is an important instance of gender performativity, both off and on stage. Female sexuality remains a subject that has yet to gain traction. This is where a play like Akshayambara becomes significant. While it does not deal directly with sexuality it does deal with the construct of gender performance. This play is an experimental work that premiered in 2015. It uses the form of Yakshagana as well as ‘Modern’ theatrical methods that interrogate the idea of representation of the female body and consequently the notion of ownership. This play has gone one to gain critical acclaim and awards for its quality and nuance when it comes to unpacking these complex ideas.