* A to-do list that would never be fully done.
* An essay written by a transwoman, pre-transition.
* Sculptures, photographs and paintings that their creators considered flawed, warped or unfinished.
These were among 30 exhibits displayed at Goethe Institut-Max Mueller Bhavan in New Delhi, in a pop-up exhibition titled Museum of Rejects.
The show was part of the queer platform Gaysi Family’s OPN Art House art bazaar, now in its second edition. The theme for the first edition, in 2023, was “Joy as a form of resistance”.
This time around, the idea was to provide a “new home” for works in progress, hoarded feelings, unsent messages, proposed applications, experimental experiments, overanalysed ideas and impulsive creations.
In doing so, the exhibition sought to offer visitors a chance to see beauty in the once-unwanted, and simply celebrate the attempt to make something.
“Our culture in India, with its quest for perfect scorecards and aced exams, does not celebrate imperfection,” says Priya Dali, 29, a children’s-book illustrator, creative director at Gaysi Family and curator of Museum of Rejects. “In most galleries and exhibits, when artists display their work, you only get to see the finished pieces and what look like really confident people who made them. We wanted to examine the struggle, what it is the person went through to get to that point, and what’s behind the confident front they put up.”
The call for submissions went out in December and, by February, Gaysi had received 200 submissions. Rather ironically, only 30 made it to the show. “The others were, sadly, rejected, but we do have plans to have more conversations about extending the theme,” Dali says.
A key factor that determined which art works made it through, was the reason they were first rejected by their makers, and were now being entered as submissions.
Among those selected, then, was a clay sculpture by artist Stuti Jain titled Study in Liminality, which exploded in the kiln during the firing process. It was a piece she had repeatedly been told wouldn’t survive a firing in the kiln. It didn’t.
What emerged was at best too experimental, she says, and at worst, “warped”.
While she was dejected at the result at first, she then started piecing it back together using epoxy and resin.
“The process made me think about liminal spaces, because I had started this work as an experiment in relinquishing control. I had sketched a face and let the clay bend and dictate much of the features,” says Jain, 27. “I am not where I was as an artist, neither am I currently where I want to be. This work represents that beautifully for me.”
Sarthak Chauhan, 25, a filmmaker, photographer and writer, called his submission Disappearing Acts. It was a compilation of photographs that didn’t fit into the narratives he had been building in various previous photo series.
“Through isolation, these photographs created a story of their own — through their similar visual language and the sense of nostalgia and ambiguity they collectively carry,” he says.
Gaysi submitted one of their deleted drafts: a social media poster titled All Types of Adarsh Indian Families. “We got caught up in trying to fix the details and it never eventually got done,” says Dali.
The chart features a “live-in lesbians wali family”; a “polyamorous aur pyaari family”; a “straight and great allies wali family” and other representations of diverse family structures.
Artist Aaratrika Roy, meanwhile, turned her undone to-do list into a sculpture titled Hustlin’, showing a tentacled figure born from the chaos of adulting, living a life of heartbreak and chores, ambitions and dreams, all precariously balanced on what she calls “a mental unicycle”.
Rayyan Monkey, a transgender Muslim woman, submitted a story she wrote during a time of intense self-hate. “It was written pre-transition and reflects the intense shame and guilt that hid me from myself,” she writes in her concept note. “This draft was deleted because I no longer felt the guilt and shame I did when I wrote the piece.” The essay now represents a version of herself that doesn’t exist any more.
What’s a deleted draft that haunts you, or one you wish you’d saved? You don’t have to tell us… but maybe you’d like to dig it out, revisit it, and let us know how it goes?
