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Fool Moon on a Dark Night

 

“The next time someone asks you why LGBT Pride marches exist or why Gay Pride Month is June tell them ‘A bisexual woman named Brenda Howard thought it should be.’” – BrendaHoward

Desee Art celebrates the PrideMonth with Soumya Sankar Bose’s critically acclaimed series of photographs, ‘Fool Moon on a Dark Night’.

‘The terms ‘façade’ and ‘appearances’ are intricately woven into the fabric of this ruling. The effectuality of a law is determined by the people who are governed by that law, and decriminalisation of homosexuality does not necessarily destigmatize the same from the psyche of the masses. Full Moon on a Dark Night is an exploration of appearances that were born out of a reaction against heteronormativity. In India, an individual needs to inculcate a heteronormative demeanour to be accepted within wider social circles.
This work was started in 2015 – way before the Supreme Court ruling. One of the most prominent social aspects that has been noticed in the process of completion of this work is that the new law scrapping Section 377 has done very little in the way of expanding the social definitions of sexual normalcy. The contours of the popular psyche have not changed much since 2015, or even before that, and this can be corroborated through the fact that well-constructed appearances still form a part of the daily lives of many people from the LGBTQ+ community.
Full Moon on a Dark Night delves deep into this very appearance that people residing outside the boundaries of heteronormativity have to affect on a daily basis. More than the context of sexuality, Soumya has tried to focus on appearance as performance. It can be easily realised that one of the primary domains of conflict in gender and sex is the physical appearance of an individual and how the perception of that appearance is directly linked to sexual identity.’

In 2017, ‘Fool Moon on a Dark Night’ received the prestigious Magnum Foundation’s Photography and Social Justice Fellowship.

Image courtesy of soumyasankarbose