Photos: Trans persons show us their authentic selves in Truth Dream
Transgender and non-binary people were asked to dress in the personas they felt reflected their inner selves. See how beautifully they turned out in the art project Truth Dream.
In Bengaluru, Payana, an NGO working to empower Karnataka’s sexual minorities, collaborated with Maraa, a media and arts collective, to offer 12 members from the city’s transgender community a chance to dress like they feel. What emerged were looks that borrowed from pop culture, cinema, myth and everyday reality. Lakshmi, 54, picked a bejewelled golden sari and ornate jewellery, inspired by images she’d seen of maharanis of Mysore. (Photo courtesy Jaisingh Nageswaran)
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Some, like Bernie, 55, found enough inspiration in everyday ideas of what was stylish. The sculptor posed as a drag king, complete with suit, moustache and beard. He wanted to impress his girlfriend and friends, he said.(Photo courtesy Jaisingh Nageswaran)
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Chandni, 49, a relationship manager at a tech company, founded Payana in 2009, and thought up the photo project. Her own fantasy: to dress like Kalidasa’s Shakuntala, a beautiful woman and daughter of a royal sage. “I thought this would make a man fall in love with me,” she says. (Photo courtesy Jaisingh Nageswaran)
Costumes, makeup, hair and backdrops filled out the fantasies. Reshma, 60, embodied the look of the late actress Sridevi. She posed in a blue sari, inspired by the song Kaate Nahi Kat Te from Mr India (1987). (Photo courtesy Jaisingh Nageswaran)
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Shobhana’s look drew on mythology, specifically Ardhanaishvara, a male-female form of Shiva, with his consort, Parvati. (Photo courtesy Jaisingh Nageswaran)
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Modus Vivendi (1000 people – 1000 Homes), 2000: In this self-portrait, a work of mixed media on canvas, Kallat appears as a swaggering, bespectacled juggler of heart and brain. The painting is an exploration of selfhood in the city of Mumbai, where he grew up and lives. The individual, lost in the multitudes, wanders in a state of perpetual disorientation, as reflected in the work. The radiating streaks of red, orange and green, reminiscent of thermal imagery, were achieved by texturing the canvas with layers of paint or canvas and then peeling off some parts to attain the desired visual effect.
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Sheer delight: While out surveying the remote Phoenix Islands Archipelago, Schmidt Ocean Institute scientists captured rare footage of a “glass octopus”, named so because it is completely see-through. What one does see when one shines a light on it is its optic nerve, eyeballs, and digestive tract. Even though this species has been known to science since 1918, scientists were forced to study about this animal through specimens found in the guts of predators, before this sighting.
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Herald / Harbinger is a permanent public art installation by Ben Rubin and Jer Thorp. It broadcasts the sounds of the Bow Glacier cracking and breaking 200 km away, to the centre of Calgary, one of Canada’s largest cities, almost in real time. The sounds and imagery shaped by data from a glacial observatory are broadcast through 16 speakers and seven LED arrays.
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Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022): The movie explores the many dimensions of parenthood and love through the story of a Chinese-American immigrant named Evelyn Wang (played by Michelle Yeoh) who, while struggling to run a failing laundromat business, uses her newfound powers to travel across multiple realities to save the world and work on her strained relationships with her loved ones. It’s a family drama that’s fast-paced, funny and, above all, tackles earnestly the idea of healing from intergenerational trauma.
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At first sight: For centuries, sunspots were thought to be Mercury passing across the Sun. By the early 17th century, with the invention of the telescope, astronomers could get a clearer look. In 1610, Galileo Galilei (who first used the telescope to observe space) in Italy and his British contemporary Thomas Harriot identified these as spots on the Sun. Seen here are 35 drawings of sunspots created by Galileo between June 2 and July 8, 1612.
