Consent of the Governed: Race/Gender, Constitution & Kink

I was commissioned to design the first two volumes in this ongoing publication series, which calls upon artists, organisers and kinksters to think about our positionality, desires and their relations to social strictures around us. Contributors come from multiple global locations; doing anti-racism work, anti-caste work, organising and thinking of Indigenous rights, Trans* rights, feminisms, BDSM, Sex Work and more.

Design for a publication series exhibited at documenta15

Curated & Edited by: Vidisha-Fadescha and Shaunak Mahbubani | Contributors: Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Dhrubo Jyoti, Latoya Aroha Rule, MF Akynos, Jyotsna Siddharth, Khaleb Brooks, and Kinkinella

Consent of the Governed: Race/Gender, Constitution & Kink

With:

Party Office & After Party Collective

Delhi / Kassel

2022

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Party Office on Instagram

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Background

Party Office is an anti-caste, antiracist, antifa, trans*feminist art and social space based in New Delhi, India.

After Party Collective, formed by artist-curator duo Vidisha-Fadescha and Shaunak Mahbubani, acts in the intersections between curatorial and performance practices. Expanding the Party as a site for critical praxis they produce spaces of embodied thinking to create momentum towards affirmation of trans*, intersex, and other gender-deviant bodies. Through their projects, they look to energise choreographies of collectivity, agency, legality, and pleasure.

After Party Collective hosted the party space/exhibition Queer Time: Kinships & Architectures, at documenta 15, where they launched the publication series Consent of The Governed: Strictures, Constitution and Kink. The publication considers subjectivities of kink as an anarchist practice that is able to deconstruct, as well as speak to, power — proposing consent and negotiation, as seen in kink, as a framework to humanize legal registers and constitutional governance.

Founded in 1955, Documenta is an exhibition of contemporary art that takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. ruangrupa was the Artistic Director of the fifteenth edition of documenta held in 2022. The Jakarta-based artists’ collective has built the foundation of documenta fifteen on the core values and ideas of lumbung (Indonesian term for a communal rice barn). lumbung as an artistic and economic model is rooted in principles such as collectivity, communal resource sharing, and equal allocation, and is embodied in all parts of the collaboration and the exhibition.