CURIOUS QUESTIONS

 This essay was written for a special issue of Art India called What Keeps You Awake At Night

 

Questions are curious things. Except when they’re not.

 

If there is one question that rings out a death knell in the world of dating (amorous, not historical) it is this: “tell me about you” (most commonly asked by men). It is as if the questioner has no confidence in a question’s poetic ability  to make a connection bloom “as Spring opens (touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose.”  As if, unable to bear the ambiguity of a moment that might go in any direction, the asker puts the onus on the other person to reveal themselves and prove they are in fact worthy of attention. It is a faux question, its missing question mark hinting at the absence of what makes a question most potent and alive: curiosity. Curiosity is vulnerable and open. It says I want to know about you, rather than, prove that you are worth listening to.

 

Quite like it, is 2023’s dominant question,  repeated ad nauseum in Western news media: do you condemn Hamas? Doctors, academics, Palestinians who have lost entire families, are subjected to this same question with false equality (which sounds so much like false equivalence.. A question asked not in order to know, but in order to not know. The question is a dictator – of binary frames and schemas—who will judge if you are worth listening to or not.

 

Documentary films are predicated on questions. The form (and allied “issue-based” work) stakes a claim to the political and so, comes freighted with a righteous glow that asserts it is – but naturally – on the right side. How does asking questions from the slight elevation of the moral high ground shape the relationship between subject and filmmaker, filmmaker and audience? Intriguingly, documentarians are encouraged to remove questions from the final edit of a film, as if they are superfluous, as if a missing self, makes the film self-less. What is an answer without a question? A little lonely, even defenceless perhaps.

 

In my film Unlimited Girls, which explored diverse engagements with feminism, one character says “Feminism isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about having a way to ask questions.” Later she adds, “If I call myself a feminist, I won’t be defined, I’d be described.”

I am infinitely curious about the forms that enable us not to define, but to describe an exchange. How might one ask questions that are open to an entirely unexpected answer – an answer that might cast me—the questioner--into a moment of ambiguity from which new meanings emerge? How might a form not simply illustrate or prove a political position, but rather, be animated by a political quest, one open to unscripted discoveries? How might art architect a different political journey where it is our companion on greater political adventures and fewer political wars?

 

For that reason I am preoccupied with how to retain a sense of ambiguity in my work. I don’t mean an ambiguity that withholds (as in the world of amorous ghosting) asking you to prove you are worthy enough to make sense of the work. I mean an ambiguity that beckons and invites engagement without setting fixed terms or defining the outcome; a motile ambiguity that may let one thing lead to another so we generate our own political understandings from the encounter. I think a lot about how to retain a political vulnerability in my work. I do not use vulnerability to describe a tremulous empathy. I mean rather, not being invulnerable, by drawing on moral authority. I search for modes of engagement with diverse publics, on a more equal plane, where artist and audience become interlocutors. I think of my work as responses to these preoccupations with the power dynamics of art – imperfect and evolving responses, in the sense that all politics is a work in progress.

 

So I draw, not from formats rooted in ‘evidence’ of right and wrong, so steeped in legalistic thinking, but from the more uncategorizable repertoires of popular culture. With their plenitude of sensations, tones and items – song, jokes, protest, conformity, violence, vulgarity, artistry, excess, glamour, melodrama and sly politics—all in one place, these modes have the capacity to create what I think of as inclusive moments of exuberance. In these moments of exuberance, boundaries of taste, rituals of political solemnity and most of all, rote political responses are carried away in a liberatory, even bodily wave of pleasure and sensation. Carefully maintained divisions between cerebral, sensual and emotional become not just quaint – yesterday’s political understanding for contemporary questions – but unnecessary. The work is a loving container for ambiguity, urging the audience to make its own meanings, to trust their intuitive political self and embark on an unscripted political journey.

 

Creative and political questions are one in these inter-textual and inter-sensory games. What might it mean to shape a short essay which doesn’t look like, but feels like a Hindi film song? What would it mean to imagine a narrative about copyright law as a romance? How might we talk about feminism by creating a digital space about sex? How might we talk about politics, like we play a game of antakshari?

 

 

Sometimes a form is devised for these purposes. Unlimited Girls with its multiple set pieces and formats – chat room, interview, comedy sketches – opens up multiple windows of feminist responses to the question of what feminism has meant to the world. Sometimes a medium can allow this to happen. In the digital platform I founded in 2015, Agents of Ishq, the question “Do you want to be an agent of ishq” has thus far elicited hundreds of responses, each story and utterance like a song – some songs may really be disguised as memes – about sex and love. Never identical, often intersecting, sometimes diverging, but expanding and redefining the terms of sexual politics as a community. The infinitude of answers becomes possible on social media, and the chance encounters are multiplied.

 

I began this relationship at first by keeping my questions in the edited film – leaving open for the audience the possibility that the answer might change with a different question, and a different questioner. I played different parts as fictional personae to make my position as filmmaker ambiguous. Over time, my own unscripted encounters with audiences allowed the works themselves to shape shift into questions that ask us to exchange the sense of inevitablity for a sense of possibility. These are questions of how we value something and of who gatekeeps what is a political question. Perhaps for the artist this vulnerability is not always enjoyable. Curatorial gatekeeping is not always up for a game of peekaboo and you might hide in plain sight and never be found. Eventually it requires that we trust our response and accord value to what has not been seen as valid by institutions and conventions, a little like love. Sometimes this keeps me up at night in excitement, an abhisarika nayika anticipating connection. At other times it keeps me up at night in despair and disappointment, a vairagan, feeling ignored.

 

 

Eventually I see this play as a form of intimacy and vulnerability between me, the artist, and the audience. I must earn the intimacy through artistry. They must traverse the ambiguities of the work, to articulate their own understandings. We risk rejection in this encounter. But we also stand to gain a kind of confidence in our political subjectivities, joined in an act of interpreting reality together. Not on offer is a validation of one’s moral position as a noble artist showing the light to an earnest audience, in turn validating their goodness in a comforting act of confirmation bias, nor leveraging a ductless intimacy with the pain of subjects, which after all the audience has done nothing to earn, like the guy on a date who says: tell me about you.