Conversation with artist Satpreet Kahlon and visiting scholar Kiran Saili

Join featured artist Satpreet Kahlon and visiting scholar Kiran Saili for a conversation of the exhibition Satpreet Kahlon: the inscrutable shape of longing. Attending to the interstices of memory and fidelity instantiated by the irreparable rupture of diasporic life, this conversation explores how queer, working-class South Asian diasporic practices of making respond to the fractured conditions of their inheritances. With attention to both feeling and form, Kahlon and Saili consider: what is the relationship between image, making, and “memory”? What does it mean to “return” to sites of trauma across expanses of space and time, and how does the body and its disobedient desires at once frustrate and enliven the possibilities of such work? Moving beyond the ossified binaries of loss and recovery that so commonly come to structure the psychic afterlives of displacement, this conversation is interested in what the body yet knows, and what it might yet uncover.