Artistic Directors Academy (ADA) Public Lecture: Celebrate, Educate, Abolish by Fadescha
About this Event
Second public lecture of Artistic Directors Academy (ADA), as part of Masterclass #2: Celebrate Educate Abolish by Fadescha.
“Some of us who grow up with an experience of being outcasted can’t discern if it was because of our gender, caste, neuro-divergence or our desires; and all of these intersections are then our queerness.” -Fadescha, 2022
In this multimedia presentation, Fadescha takes us through their transdisciplinary practice grounded in Queer Anarchist politics, and the intersectionality of caste-based subjugation. Caste is a system of exclusion and untouchability that ranks people at birth into a hierarchy based on alleged purity and pollution.
Fadescha finds voice through curatorial, artistic and theoretical making. They organise, and propose rest, parties and social gatherings as sites and tools for resisting the patriarchal, fascist and neo-liberal order. Fadescha through their curatorial project Party Office have been publishing works centring lived experiences of those structurally marginalised, producing counter archives through self-representation.
Fadescha hopes we abolish various systems of assimilation that become tools of oppression including gender, borders, caste, ability, ethnicity and race; not only structurally on the streets and institutions but also within our colonised minds and at our homes.
“Celebrate, Educate, Abolish” emerges from the call to action made by the Anti-Caste polymath of India Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s “Educate, Agitate, Organise”* for annihilation of caste towards equality, freedom, justice and liberty.
*[All India Depressed Classes conference in July 1942 in Nagpur, India]
Join Masterclass #2: Queer Labour as Modular Participant!
Approved for SkillsFuture Credit eligibility, individual Artistic Directors Academy (ADA) Masterclass modules are open for paying participation at S$1,000.
Inviting all interested members of discourse, cultural, design, arts, scientific, and adjacent professions/industries. Limited slots only — apply NOW!
About Masterclass #2: Queer Labour
Working towards a manifesto for a future space and time essential towards empathetic futures, participants will have opportunities to absorb and discuss through artworks and texts, and sessions of embodied practice. The focus will be on voices and lived-experience of the structurally marginalised, as we witness the sites and forms of Queer Labour, the labour of surviving the everyday.
Participants will assay Fadescha’s ‘Qworkaholics Anonymous’, a project that reimagines the format of de-addiction programs like Alcoholics Anonymous, and creates a time and space for marginalised individuals to acknowledge and celebrate the labour of their very act of survival. Such labour is often dismissed as unproductive by the neoliberal order, whose measures overlook the exhaustion of individuals excluded from the hegemony, who constantly navigate obstacles and defend their identities.
In a society that values isolation and self-abandonment, over self and collective care, prioritising one’s own needs and wellbeing is a form of resistance. Together, participants will read through ‘The Twelve Steps of Qworkaholics Anonymous’ designed to de-addict from the ‘burnout’ faced while doing this labour, through a metaphysical connection with ourselves and our peers. The masterclass will be guided by emotion and intuition, rather than try to succeed theoretically.
About the Masterclass Specialists: Fadescha
Vidisha-Fadescha (they/them) is an artist, curator and cultural critic. Holding their lived experience of a radical gender, caste, race and disability, Fadescha suggests centering one’s own body and desire towards liberation. Their artistic work includes video, sound installations, text, and performance. They direct collective practices as a norm-critical pedagogy to queer hegemony.
Fadescha’s curatorial project, Party Office, is an anti-caste, anti-racist, trans-feminist, art and social, space and time that was founded in New Delhi in 2020. Through publications, grants, archives, conversations of life-lived, social gatherings, and more, they are building transnational dialogues on empathetic futures, care communities, and personal agency.
In 2024, Fadescha (for Party Office) curated the exhibition ‘Resonance Beyond Escape: Qworkaholics Anonymous III’ (June-Oct 2024, Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts), a digital curatorial ‘we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for’ (July 2024, performing borders) and were an artist at the Lagos Biennial. In 2023, Vidisha participated in projects with Prince Claus Fund Biennial Symposium (Colombo), Survival Kit 14 (Riga), Rehearsing Moves on Hazy Paths (at ZK/U Berlin), Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts (Vilnius / Nida), Kunst im Untergrund (organised by nGbK Berlin), 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Sydney), and was a lumbung artist at documenta fifteen, Kassel in 2022.
Fadescha’s work has been published in arts and cultural magazines including Frieze, Flash Art, Texte zur Kunst, Metropolis M, Hyperallergic, Mezosfera, Aperture Magazine, Art in America, Galerie, Dazed, and Vogue.
Courtesy of Fadescha
Donation — Support T:>Works, Support Thought Leadership
If you are in a position to give more, please consider further contributions towards this and future programmes of Artistic Directors Academy (ADA). Your contributions, no matter big or small, help us mount ADA and enable a capacity development project where T:>Works will share its immense skills in the international field, translating international developments to artistic positions in the local context.
Admission Rules
Rating / Age Limit
- No age limit for registration.
- All other admissions are subject to valid registration tickets produced at the entrance.
Photography / Video Recording Rules
- Please note that photographs and videos of patrons may be taken at the event for use in our archival and publicity materials.
Wheelchair Users
- 72-13 is wheelchair-accessible and includes limited wheelchair seating. Please contact us at 6737 7213 to book wheelchair seats.
Contact Us
- For more information on Artistic Directors Academy (ADA), please visit tworksasia.org/ada.
- For any enquiries, please email ticketing@tworksasia.org or call at 6737 7213.
About Artistic Directors Academy (ADA)
Artistic Directors Academy (ADA), led by T:>Works Artistic Director Ong Keng Sen, is a research laboratory to develop Artistic Directors, harnessing international cultural innovators to helm Masterclass modules, as well as individual mentoring to sharpen and intensify skillsets.
ADA focuses on giving perspectives to existing and potential Artistic Directors who wish to facilitate creative platforms, collectives, engagement projects, companies, venues, and festivals. ADA is a curriculum-based capacity development project where T:>Works will share its immense skills in the international field, translating international developments to artistic positions in the local context, and therefore opening up creative avenues internationally whilst being based locally.