The need to interrogate colonial legacies and their infliction of harm on marginalized voices has always been urgent, even more in present times. Coloniality outlives colonialism through unequal power relations that shape our ways of being and our relationships with one another. This raises questions about present manifestations of historical harm, social and political privilege, and the hegemony of Eurocentric production of knowledge. Racism is an insidious manifestation of such a structure that is often relationally disavowed to restore psychic equilibrium (Layton 2006). Black feminist authors remind us that what is invisible is not always absent; that we must find tools to theorize lived experience and challenge normative ways of living that create conditions for oppression (Lorde 2018; Taylor 2023). While training to practice psychotherapy in the UK, reflective practices of visual art became a medium for me to think with silences that presented themselves while I grappled with my social and cultural identity as a student from India. I found gaps in dominant theories that invisibilized the nuances of my own cultural experience, recreating colonial dynamics of erasure. I work towards bridging these gaps to link colonial history with ongoing epistemic violence in academic classrooms. Drawing from Gopinath’s (2018) thinking on queer aesthetic practices amongst South Asian diaspora in the UK, this art exhibition centres the sensorial, the mundane and the immediate as a practice of resistance to hegemonic power. I use the visual motif of a Decolonial eye as a metaphor to bring attention to the painful ambivalence of existing in-between geographical borders that create complex conditions for social belonging. This presentation grapples with the key theme of ‘Crisis and Opportunity’ to reveal how aesthetic practices can offer possibilities for resistance amidst crises of interpersonal recognition in a racialised world.

Keywords: Race; Coloniality; Queer Aesthetics; Resistance; Art