Queerborough Speaker Series: Abhirami Balachandran Artist Talk

Event Description

The Queerborough Archival Project aims to document the past, present, and futures of queer Scarborough, an eastern suburb in the city of Toronto. This speaker series is part of a larger research project that seeks to develop a digital archive of queer Scarborough, affirming that queer people have been – and continue to be – present in Scarborough despite the common notion that queerness only exists in the downtown core. With a lack of existing archival material and formal documentation, we are looking to use creative practice to generate new artifacts that document and affirm our community’s continued presence and resilience.

Funded by the Queer and Trans Research Lab at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, this speaker series seeks to both spotlight the works of local queer of colour artists and open up space for queer youth to gather, and creatively think through questions around space, memory, and queer futures/possibilities of Scarborough. Each invited artist will facilitate a series of two events - a virtual artist talk that contextualizes their artistic practice and how queerness + Scarborough informs their work, and a subsequent hands-on workshop where participants are invited to directly produce personal artistic works with guidance from the facilitator. We encourage those interested to attend both sessions of each artist.

Speaker Bio

Abhirami Balachandran (they/them) is a second-generation Tamil diasporic educator and artist born and raised in Scarborough. As a descendant of a displaced community, Abhirami explores intergenerational trauma, isolation, loss, belonging and healing through the lens of queer Tamil identity. Deeply inspired by the work of archivists, Abhirami aims to bring to light the stories of resilience and survival against all odds within the realm of queer Tamil histories. Most recently, they have collaborated with Scarborough Museum to create the first queer Tamil art exhibition in the diaspora, featuring 10 multi-disciplinary artists from across the globe. The various thought-provoking pieces reflected on themes of remembrance and resistance through the visual exploration of identity, displacement and war.