In 2022, Manu Kaur experienced severe hopelessness and depression, to the point of being hospitalized. Kaur, who is Punjabi and Dalit – the latter being a term used to describe the most oppressed people in India’s caste system — comes from a family with a lot of intergenerational trauma. “And as a result, there’s just a lot of mental health issues,” Kaur says. “Depression runs deep.”
After Kaur recovered, they decided to host a birthday party to celebrate their life. “It was very queer. It was very trans. It was very rooted in joy and celebration,” Kaur says. “It gave me so much more purpose. And it kind of just showed me like, if I can do that for myself, then I can also do it for [the] community.”
And so they did. Through an Emerging Curators Program with the Asian American Women Artists Association, Kaur curated Dalit Dreamlands: Towards an Anti-Caste Future, a multimedia exhibition spotlighting over 30 artists from Dalit, Adivasi (tribes indigenous to South Asia), Afro-Indian, Indo-Fijian, Indo-Caribbean and Muslim communities.
Opening April 6 during Dalit History Month, the exhibition showcases artists working in digital art, painting, fashion design, film and more. Kaur is featured in the exhibition, as well, in family photographs by photographer Simrah Farrukh.
“It was the first time that my family and I had professional photos taken of us, like, ever. And so that was so meaningful to me because my family doesn’t often get to be celebrated,” Kaur says. “And now to have them exhibited in a gallery space feels so incredible to me.”
Kaur hopes the exhibition will educate people on what being Dalit means; “There’s no one ‘look’ to being Dalit,” Kaur says. They also hope it represents the community’s reclamation of the term – which literally translates to “broken” in Sanskrit – and how the community is advocating for a more just future. Kaur says that’s why calling the exhibition Dalit Dreamlands felt right.
