TRUTH DREAM: Breaking Gender Norms through a Phantasmagoria of Lived Desire
Photo: Anna Lynn
How a photo exhibition in Bengaluru narrated lived desires that break through ideals of beauty and ageing, of fixed gender identities and permitted dreams.
In the foyer of The Bangalore International Centre, towards the left wall, you see the first set of photographs. There are five in each set. The first one is a large A3 print, capturing the subject in their dreamscape. A second A4 print captures a gesture, a movement, an emotion, and three others of a smaller size zoom into the finer details of the performance. Upon scanning a QR code by the corner of each dreamscape, audio speakers nearby begin to play classic music from old Tamil and Kannada cinema. The viewer thus enters into a cinematic realm, watching a man in a suit staring across the sea; or sharing a glace with the belle, posing against the calm of large gardens, accompanied by filmy music of yesteryear.
You are transported in time and space.
For members of the trans community, dreams are denied, dreams are swallowed by heterosexual norms of the binary, even caste and class hierarchies. Chandni conceptualised this project as a space where unlived dreams come true, are realised, and find a way for expression.
The sentiment of narrating desire through the surreal is echoed in the title of this photo exhibition. However, Truth Dream refuses to be reduced to its dream. It narrates lived desires that break through ideals of beauty and ageing, of fixed gender identities and permitted dreams. Maraa—an arts and media collective based in Bangalore—and Payana, a community-based organisation working for the interests of sexual and gender minorities in Karnataka—jointly organised the show, open to public viewing in December 2021.
In one of the crowdsourcing videos that Maraa published on social media, Chandni, the founding member of Payana, says, “We have some secret dreams, that we were unable to realise.” For members of the trans community, dreams are denied, dreams are swallowed by heterosexual norms of the binary, even caste and class hierarchies. Chandni conceptualised this project as a space where unlived dreams come true, are realised, and find a way for expression. On the definition of ‘Truth Dream’, she says, “The body grows old, not our feelings or dreams.” The members of the show are trans women, trans men, persons identifying as gender-neutral and kothi, hailing from Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. All of them are above the age of 50. There are twelve sets of photo exhibits. They are distributed between the first and second floor of the centre. Each set of photographs reads like a motion series, narrating the reclamation of heteronormative narratives through lived desire.
Judith Butler—arguably the pioneer of third-generation feminism—rewrote gender away from binaries, from heteronormativity. Truth Dream’s narratives of lived desire and longing resonate with Butlerian visions. Dreams become spaces that set free identities which are policed and conditioned by a heteronormative and casteist society. Through a Butlerian performativity, Truth Dream uses the motif of the dream through a cinematic lens—in photography, lighting, action and backdrop. These elements come together to form the dreamscape.
Laura Mulvey would call cinema a phantasmagoria, where elements of fantasy, illusion, the fantastic and the real narrate themselves. In performing and reconstructing their “secret dreams”, Truth Dream borrows elements of our own culture to create this dreamlike reality. Some of them embody characters from mythology and classical literature, like Shakuntala and Ardhanarishvara. Some others manifest their desires of characters from 60s cinema, including heroines coy in love and longing, dancers lost in the thrall of palace courts, village maidens dreaming in gardens or pathways, cabaret dancers and queens occupying spaces with power and grace. Accompanied by film songs of the 60s and 70s, the project questions, breaks and occupies cultural spaces which have erased the experiences of those amongst us who do not conform.
The project relied on costume and design to recreate mythical and cinematic dreams. In the crowdsourcing video on the concept of the project, some of the community models share the dreams that they relive through the exhibition. Bernie, the trans community model who stares across a shoreline, dressed in a crisp suit with a watch and sunglasses, says, “I’d like to see myself as a Drag King. This is my desire.” Clothing, props and backdrops add to this phantasmagorical performance. The community models chose clothes best suited to their characters: suits, ghagra cholis, sarees, even the Ardhanarishvara form that embodies a fluidity of gender. Props, like toy rabbits, baskets of flowers, huge golden crowns, Rolex watches, tridents and painted pots completed their character traits. The backdrops captured dreamscapes — sea shores, palace floors, sprawling gardens, even Kailasam.
Photo: Anna Lynn
The gallery at BIC exhibited a series of photographs that documented the process of transforming the artists — moments in make-up, gestures and smiles were caught on camera. Revathi, writer of A Truth About My Life: A Hijra Life Story says, “After watching the film, Thirumal Perumai (1968), I thought that if I was devoted to Perumal, I would get married. After many years, neither did Perumal come, nor did I get married.”
Revathi is dressed as a divine bride. A dancing goddess. In creating a performance photograph that recodes previously gendered tools, she subverts the narrative in which a trans woman may not be married, in which Perumal (Lord) may not reach her. In Revathi’s gestures of dance, in Poornima and Chandni’s expressions of love, in Reshma’s recreation of Sridevi’s star persona, this fantasy invokes both divinity and desire, the fantastical and the real, a bending and breaking of what was previously denied: a free reign for bodily expression of secretly-nurtured dreams. Each performance, in recreation, ascribes new meanings to previously heteronormative ideals of beauty, stardom, grace, youth and gender expression.
The colour images of the exhibit itself, were shot by Jaisingh Nageshwaran, a self-taught photographer from Madurai. He says, “Photography is about happiness, it is also about the dream. Through this work, I hope to capture what they believe.” Each photograph narrates this experience in the style of film and fantasy — dreams translate into lived desire. In total, a set of 12 photo exhibits of various persons from the transgender community. Each floor exhibited six sets, capturing the subject in communication with their deeply personal dreams.
The photographs were captured studio-style, with large paintings creating the background. These painted tapestries were hung by the ceiling of each floor that exhibited the photo series. As you walk by, you experience them in dimensions of largesse and closeness. Questions arise within you: Are these spaces that let identities be? Or are these spaces begging to contain all that we are — assigned, discarded and chosen for our own selves? Will they allow existence only within a dream? Or is this an unfettering?
Butler questioned laws and languages, and how they imposed gender. Truth Dream as an art form, questioned and broke the norms. This art project foregrounded desires that beget transformation into gods and goddesses, the desire to reclaim that bodies that our psyche manifests like a dream. In performing these desires, in photographing them through a cinematic lens, the art form narrates the body, not just as a site of political struggle, but also as a site of reclamation.
Are these spaces that let identities be? Or are these spaces begging to contain all that we are — assigned, discarded and chosen for our own selves? Will they allow existence only within a dream? Or is this an unfettering?
In addition to the set of concept photographs accompanied by film songs, the painted tapestries, and black and white photographs archiving the stages of creating the performed pictures, Truth Dream included a video trailer by the members who participated in the project. Kannadi—the accompanying table book to the exhibition—contained poetry, short stories and essays on beauty, ageing and fantasy by the members of the transgender community.
The poem “What is the Reason?”, part of the Kannadi collection illustrates the artistic dreamscape through verse, but any reader can discern that these emotions are steeped in real pain:
The world interferes in the way of life
just let me go for a little bit
The warmth of my breath is my guardian
Go away, without a trace of sound
my world is empty, I have already forgotten
Stop knocking on my door.
In the everyday struggle of false dreams
I will doze off dreaming of death…
The name of the book also uses the mode of performance playfully—Kannadi means Mirror in Tamil and Kannada. The concept of creating a performative exhibit of these dreams has an embedded message: we inhabit ourselves, just like you and me, we do not change internally as we don performative languages. But we use these performative languages, accepted in the realm of dreams to narrate our lived desires. Understanding cinema as a phantasmagoria also implies the sight of this social unconscious thriving within it.
Photo: Anna Lynn
Is it easy to break the gender norms of our social unconscious? Absolutely not. I think of Revathi’s autobiography, The Truth About Me: A Hijra Life Story. Revathi has crossed difficult experiences: losing family members, searching for friends, facing sexual harassment and living with memories of violence and marginalisation. In her autobiography and in her later book on Trans Activism, she translates these memories into writing. And later, into art, in her one-act play, Nanna Dhvani, which she performed at the Bangalore Queer Film Festival of 2019.
The creative process is therefore a language soaked in human experience. In Truth Dream, dressed as a divine bride, enraptured in the gestures of dance, she lives and explodes that dream deferred. Community derived creations of art like this photo exhibition, throws worlds of experience into the free play of expression. Thus, art offers an alternate medium of expression—which is here enacted by performance.
When the body performs this dreamscape, what seemed to be a mirage now finds a living embodiment. The photograph as a medium presents this in the liminal space between dream and reality. This is the truth of dreams. When a previously objectified body scripts its own subjectivity, there is a subversion of the norm.
Here, the subversion is of gender norms. And a phantasmagoria of lived desire, in an explosion of deferred dreams, breaks the norms that oppressed them. A celebration of these desires can supersede the marginalisation of a body based on ideals of age or beauty, or even gender assignment.
Truth Dream is an act of living desire and identity, a reality of how Butler’s theory for political acts of performative subversion can destroy gender norms that deny its fiction — which is its only truth. A dream that bids entrance into a world of lived desire.
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Anna Lynn is a research scholar at EFL University. Her areas of interest include women's writing, art and cinema. The anxieties of a feminine heart are a constant muse and as the Woolfian stream passes, she presses watered images into writing. You can find her work on Sunflower Collective, Esthesia Magazine, Gulmohur Quarterly, In Plainspeak, and her blog www.seagirlstories.wordpress.com. Anna is on Instagram: @seagirlstories and @lettersinthemargins.
