The Sandbox Collective collaborated with an interdisciplinary artist Deepika Bhardwaj for a project they called Rest Your Thoughts Here: The Gender Chronicles.
Despite many saying and even believing that the pandemic was of a great scale, the truth was different. The outbreak of COVID-19 and the resulting lockdown affected different people differently. While the virus itself did not discriminate, it exposed layers of existing discrimination and privilege.
The Sandbox Collective, a female-led arts collective focusing on gender, sensed these discrepancies. Nimi Raveendran, co-founder of the organization says, “We have heard that domestic violence has increased. Our friends in the theater were fundraising for transgender people and sex workers who had no way of coping with the disaster. It was a testing time for women and gender minorities. We wanted to do something that involved something concrete.”
The Sandbox Collective collaborated with interdisciplinary artist Deepika Bhardwaj for a project which they called ‘Rest Your Thoughts Here: The Gender Chronicles’.
“Not a very convenient name, but we wanted to invite people to just take a breath and put their thoughts in the journals,” says Dipikah, the project’s curator. “Even a small note or scribble was welcome. We sprinkled the magazines with some signs like- ’emotional’ Pickle (Pickles)’, ‘Sometimes I wonder…’ and some collages to break the formidability of a blank page. We wanted to create a safe space through RYTH boxes that carried magazines, art supplies, markers and some candy in the city (Bengaluru),” she explains.
The lockdown was a hindrance to magazines reaching beyond the urban youth. “It was a logistical nightmare. Sometimes we paid people at Dal Makhani to carry books from one end of the city to the other,” she says. And they managed to get some diverse perspectives.
“Transgender activist and artist Kalki Subramaniam has contributed a video of her poem in Tamil, we also have some interviews and poems in Hindi. We did an online collaborative program using MIRO (Whiteboard) boards where people contributed live.
It was challenging for Deepika to curate the project. “People had shared their deeply personal views. It was quite a responsibility to take these experiences forward and present them online. ,
She struggles to choose a favorite entry. “There is an entry by artist Meenal Singh that I really like, it says ‘My little daughters noticed that my dismay is picking up their pink. It’s because Mamma doesn’t like girls,'” she said. “‘It sums up the dilemma of being a feminist mother so well. Meenal’s frustration probably stems from an overabundance of commercial color coding of fallen things. However, her kids interpret it differently.”
Around 30 entries – artifacts, videos, poems, anecdotes and pure scribbles – will be on display from 28 November during the launch of the exhibition, supported by the Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Bangalore.
The live event will also feature a live Hindi poem by Kavita Malviya and artist Avril Stormi Ungar will showcase an artwork that made it to the magazine.
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