Collaborative works

Yes, we can kiss privately and publically in India.
(Poster distribution 2003)


Yes, we can kiss privately and publicly in India.

Unlike democracy, kissing is an indigenous phenomenon, though today it is conveniently and conservatively held as a western phenomenon, has been globalised
(Sensational Hollywood) and accepted across nationalistic boundaries except maybe in the male dominated traditional countries, otherwise as a symbolic gesture and as one of the many political tools of gender equality.
Having come from a semi-conservative society where arranged marriages are preferred over romantic alliances, we never got the golden opportunity to watch our parents kiss, as the promise of love remains distant within such suppressive institutions. The recognition of the due dignity of my mother as a loved wife/lover remained denied in public places. Her affection, care, love, sacrifice and homework was never recognised in the public spaces, like any other married or unmarried woman, or the woman who loves. It is this male shyness/embarrassment / becoming conscious is a typical excuse given by the conservatives, that discriminate, refuses to acknowledge and thereby creates the unreliable Other.
Having come from a society, which desperately exhumes Ayodhya (Ideal) to suppress Konarak/Khajuraho (pleasure) has led us to denounce public spaces to the conservative religious, commercial and political industry run in the name of government.
Doubly colonized by feudalistic conservative religion, which teaches us to respect hierarchy, subservient to the male/father/god, unlike preceding societies, and the negativity of the industrialized society where the decorum is maintained for Surplus Extraction. Society by and large is conduit to the cultural suppression of this very freedom that in the process is silenced. In the bid to colonize both by religion and industrial discipline the cultural enslavement of the global psyche has amount to major illusions/distortions, deviating from the radical simplicity of compassionate and a fearless society, to citizens who are being constantly frisked/doubted to be a potential threat to the society.
It is not a nostalgic pursuit and neither can one take any anachronistic leap towards freer times but to navigate throughout the conservative power conglomerates of the constantly colonizing attitudes, heinous attempts to eradicate the claims of self governed societies.
Our attempt here is to exchange our poster in return to your photograph of kissing in public to generate a consensus both locally and globally for an unrestricted society, which does not exclude or refuse its own kisses and nightmares.
Our attempt here is to extend our private/intimate space into the public/violent space of segregation. If only we could include the affectionate gestures/expressions into the public spaces as a social /inner necessity overcoming our cultural shyness and protectionist conservatism, otherwise if sexual freedom comes via the market/privatisation/ globalisation, via commercial mainstream culture, mass media and advertisement, then we shall definitely be ready to be liberated by whores, gigolos and pimps. As religious/moral restrictions creates heaven and commercial choice creates hell, as the phenomenon of love/eroticism to liberate and homogenise the hierarchy of a caste /class society remains one of our unrealised dreams.

With tenderness and vicious love
From Shantanu
To Manmeet

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Hamam main hum sab nangey hai, pur yeh hamam hai kahan? (Banner)
(Public performance, New Delhi 2005)



Representation of the body has always been threatened by the super sophistication of the techniques of its time,so the need to bring the body instead of the ritual back into the discourse will always be needed to be done.... otherwise it can soon get swamped by the speculative overproduction of corporate capitalism.