DOES YOUR HOUSE HAVE LIONS

In Does Your House Have Lions (2021), a film by Delhi-based poet vqueeram and LA-based artist Vishal Jugdeo, a queer household of activists and academics in New Delhi lives under the shadow of increasing authoritarianism. Shot in a cinéma vérité style, the film dwells among the friends and lovers vqueeram lived with in the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as in the pandemic’s early months. The film documents moments of queer intimacy and togetherness, proposing possibilities for resistance against the immense power of the state.

Vishal Jugdeo (born in Regina, Canada; lives and works in Los Angeles) is a multidisciplinary artist who works with video, installation and performance to construct experimental approaches to narrative, fusing documentary and fictional strategies. His works have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, ICA Philadelphia and Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam. Jugdeo is a 2015 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, and has received major project funding from the Canada Council for the Arts. Jugdeo is Assistant Professor and New Genres Area Head in the UCLA Department of Art.

vqueeram (born in Delhi, India; lives and works in Delhi) is a writer, researcher and teacher based in Delhi. They are interested in sex, feeling, and living/dying in their relations with forms of sociality, law and politics. At the Center for Law and Policy Research, Bengaluru, vqueeram teaches a course on intersectionality for various law schools in the country and participates in research and policy work on the rights and concerns of the trans community in India. In their writing, vqueeram pays attention to the practices of imagination and freedom of queer/trans persons; whether building a life in a cemetery in Delhi or in life writing -cinematic, authorial and political.

Does Your House Have Lions (2021), digital video, 49 minutes. Courtesy of the artists.

Part of a screening program of works by LGBTI+ artists and of queer creations.

KIRIK’s 2023/24 programs are supported by the SAHA Sustainability Fund.