Adwait

During this residency, I wish to develop my writing and curatorial project “Cassandraic Whispers” that will generate meditations on specific forms of madness and absurdisms engendered by post-truth conditions. Taking Cassandra—a character in Greek mythology, tragically fated by Apollo to not be believed—as its torch bearer, the project will attempt to diagnose the cultural curse that muffles certain critical truths with a mantle of madness, gaslighting or manipulation. The figure of the tragic seer, whose foresight dooms her, recurs through various cultures and different moments in time. Her words, pregnant with import, are met with derision and disbelief until it is too late and the feared eventuality comes to pass. The ramblings of the tragic seer, or its corollary the mad woman in the attic, signify apocalyptic knowledges whose bearing comes at a terrible mental and social cost. These catastrophic truths merit further engagement given their tortuous and tortured political journey. Subsequently, I’ll be journeying with Cassandra to make sense of our current political moment, our hysteria and schizophrenia, and these times that beg credulity.

Adwait is an independent curator and writer, currently based out of India, whose work is given to contextualising alternative art practices in and beyond South Asia. By engaging queer-feminist praxis, animist perspectives, counter-histories and anarcho-mystical frameworks they have been trying to workshop how we relate to each other, the things around us, and the world at large.

Notable curations include the fifth edition of the Mardin Biennial (Turkey, 2022) and the fifteenth edition of the Queer Arts Festival (Vancouver, B.C., 2022). Their writings have appeared in various publications like Aperture, The Artpaper, Art Asia Pacific, Art India and Take on Art over the years. They are currently pursuing a writing fellowship with Sharjah Art Foundation and partners.