Ashok Vish on residency in Switzerland
Residencies stimulate creative and mutual exchange between artists.
Pro Helvetia offers three months’ studio residencies and research residencies where artists are encouraged to develop their practice in a climate of cultural diversity.
Drawing from his training in filmmaking and interests in image-making, Ashok Vish’s practice opens up spaces for engagement between audience and imagery, between viewers and subjects, to bridge chasms separating “us” from “them”. His research interests include queer narratives from South Asia and diasporic boundary-crossing identifications that emphasize the significance of postcolonial, ethnic, racial, religious, class, caste and linguistic formations in addressing questions related to the representation of alternative genders and sexualities.
Ashok Vish is also interested in examining and disputing Western bias in queer paradigms and Western models of global queerness. By doing so, he aims to highlight the growing presence of queer subjectivity and the recreation of cultural identities through lived and mediated realities in South Asia. Research around cyber-ethnographic studies and the influence of pop-culture supplement his practice.
On residency in Switzerland from 1-20 August, Ashok will attend the Locarno film festival and meet with curators. He will also visit artist Lukas Acton and observe living with like-minded individuals at a queer commune in the mountains at Bern. Ashok previously assisted Acton’s research in Garadi local wresting pits in Bengaluru and will now learn his screen printing techniques incorporating photography, also while in Bern.
