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One of my friends used to tell me about her dreams.
For the last sixteen years after her sister's death, she dreamt of sitting on a chair beside a window as if she had just returned home from an unidentified war while someone lay dead on the bed nearby. This was the same room and the bed where her sister died. However the identity of the dead character was never clear to her. It could have been her lover, her sister or maybe her mother. Why was she projecting herself as a warrior in her dream? Was it because she has been fighting for the acceptance of her sexual preference in our society? Or was it because her mother always told her that it's a crime to love a girl? It was evident, however, that her dream was an indication to the anxiety that she faced in pursuing her love of choice, a fundamental human right.
The narrative about my friends’ subconscious instigated me to work on the stories of my LGBTQ friends in India and their rights, their dreams and desires. In a society, which poses multiple boundaries for them to even live a ‘normal’ life, this work looks at the utopian ideal of a fictional world where there is freedom for one to exist as per their own desires. The images are made in collaboration with the subjects, recreating scenes and characters of how they would like to see and present themselves to the world.