Who is shilo shiv suleman

She started following her wanderlust instincts at the age of thirteen when she travelled from Bengaluru to Goa alone. Illustration became the closest way to fulfil the gratitude I felt for those experiences and landscapes encountered. I started to draw incessantly in notebooks that I carry with me.

Collecting stories, places, and faces and pressing flowers between the pages. Cover of the book Pampasutra by Shilo Shiv Suleman. I mainly use watercolours and collages -all sorts of textures and photographs that I find while travelling around the country… As for style- I work with what comes most naturally to me and is an almost instinctual and personal form of expression. NH7 Kabootar. In terms of cultural icons and figures, I think I am surrounded by them.

For example, the story of Akka Mahadevi who is a 14 th century poet from Karnataka. She took off all her clothes and went running through the forests, writing mystic poetry. And all of her poetry is about the female body, and the gaze. She is an influence as well. So, friends who I feel like I have very deep connections with, and with all of the work I do, and Fearless in particular.

Whenever I talk of Fearless , I talk in plural terms. So I think I am those two thousand people when I walk into a room. Why did you pick painting or illustration as a medium of storytelling? Because I started off as an illustrator, but now the things that I am doing are not necessarily related to illustration. Now, I am doing large scale installations in the desert, or I am doing stages.

Even though visual storytelling is the base of it, I feel like I am still evolving, which is amazing. Do you have a style that you can call your signature style? Or are you always trying out new things? The style is the same. Everything, eventually is my art. I feel like I am living my art in every aspect of my life. I am not minimalist. I am incredibly abundant. I have great belief that beauty can transform us. But it actually ties back to wonder and magical realism as well. There are some things that are very specific to my work, some ideas and core philosophies that are very specific to my work, but the work itself keeps evolving as I evolve.

Where do you look out for inspiration? How do you come up with new ideas and know that this is a new project that I need to take up? I feel that my whole life has become a big canvas at the moment. Sources of inspiration range from old lovers to patterns on trees to the way that the flower opens to the way the wind feels on my skin to stories, mythological stories to all of it.

Everything is both feeding itself, as well as creating itself. It feeds itself and it also creates, generates itself. So I feel that my artistic process mimics the natural, creative process in that sense. It depends. The things that I am working on right now are part of my larger thought experiment and heart experiment. I am always in love with what I am doing right now. It is more of my own personal practice. I am balancing both those works and both are currently my favorite.

Your initiative, the Fearless Collective, consists of a group of artists that create public art as a dialogue about gender and sexuality in India. How did you come up with this idea? What particular issues about women are you most passionate about? Walk us through a workshop and how your engage the community for a common cause? And, it was like this kind of instinctive reaction where all of us felt like we needed to go out on to the streets, wearing all our wedding clothes and it was really, really inspiring.

But some of it was also quite disturbing, to be honest. And that kind of fear spread not only in the media but also to people who I really cared about and people who really cared about me. So fear sometimes comes from a good place. A lot of these boundaries were being created as a way of protecting me, but in the process I felt like we were forgetting about the larger picture. We need more women out on the streets, together, collectively.

So, I created one poster which reaffirmed to me, that no matter what I am wearing, what time it is at night, I never ask for it. Then, I put up another poster. Then, I put up an open call for posters, which got really good responses.

I filled my mouth with your name, I looked for water with a divining rod, I called your ancestors out of their sweat and salt. I invoked your forefathers and tried to forgive them. I met a fertility goddess.

I covered my body in seaweed. I traced blue lines across a map. I consulted an oracle. You must have heard me or a good planet must have graced me with their charms because my phone glittered and vibrated.

So I turned to river and wrapped myself around your ankles. You took me to a kingdom of mosses. I try to impress you by walking on water, offer hibiscus and milk to your demigods. Begum Akhtar, for example, used to come on stage with a whisky in her hand and sing love songs and sing songs about desire.

Suleman is not just a revolutionary figure in the broader artist community in India but also specifically in the queer community for her no-holds-barred ability to cut through the bullshit and speak about issues without fear of repercussion.

I ask her about style and she tells me about Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Frida Kahlo, Amrita Sher-Gil, and Begum Akhtar and about how the one take-away from the lives of these geniuses is that rebellions begin in our bodies. She believes that, as an artist, her body is the first canvas. Often, there is nothing legible enough done by them to drive change.