TextaQueen’s Bollywouldn’t was commissioned in 2021 as the first in a three-year series run by Copyright Agency Partnerships (CAP), an initiative of the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund, with leading Australian arts institutions 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (4A), Sydney, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne, and Institute of Modern Art (IMA), Brisbane, designed to support mid-career and established visual artists with an $80,000 artistic commission and solo exhibition opportunity.
TextaQueen in studio. Photograph: Pia Johnson
For over twenty years, TextaQueen has been known for using the humble fibre-tip marker to draw out complex politics of gender, race, sexuality, and identity in detailed portraiture.
Bollywouldn’t, on view at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney NSW 2000, until 18 December 2022, is a balm to the displacement of diaspora, deconstructing the “-isms” in the Bollywood genre and giving agency back to South Asians, particularly those marginalised through sexuality and gender identities. This major commission echoes TextaQueen’s enduring practice of connecting with the community using texta as a mechanism to bring people together. The artist’s portraits of queer South Asian community have been digitally mapped onto buildings in and around London, creating the illusion that they exist as actual murals on a monumental scale against colonial structures.
In discussing their work, TextaQueen says: “Bollywouldn’t is a catchphrase decolonised; it is an imagining of utopia and reclamation of power. This work is an energetic offering that will inspire us South Asians to think about our relationship with the white gaze, how each of us can anchor in our subtext or prejudice and what we can do to dissolve it.”
TextaQueen, Bollywouldn’t, installation view at 4A Centre for Contemporary Art 2022. Photograph: Anna Hay. Courtesy the artist and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
TextaQueen recently added, “Dreaming up Bollywoudn’t, I was inspired by the connections I made in London during my ACME residency with queer and trans South Asian communities and the forces of disruption and reclamation that are so familiar to anti-colonial movements. Imagining new worlds, Bollywouldn’t asks us questions and offers riddles – the only way to really parlay with power. These narratives are right at home at 4A, and I’m chuffed to be presenting Bollywouldn’t with support from the Copyright Agency Partnerships commission.”
On the initiative, Copyright Agency CEO Josephine Johnston notes: “As an annual competitive commission hosted over three years, CAP is providing critical mentoring and financial support to artists such as TextaQueen, affording them the time, space and resources to create, along with a guarantee that the work will be exhibited with curatorial and institutional support. For today’s visual artists, it’s a unique creative and development opportunity to which we hope many will apply for the third-year commission funding.”
In 2023 the Copyright Agency will partner with ACCA to exhibit the next artist, James Nguyen’s major exhibition Open Glossary, opening in September 2023. The third artist commission and exhibition through the CAP will be offered in 2023 with IMA.
