Serena Chopra’s film triptych, Mother Ghosting will show as part of Joshua Ware’s Urban Aggregate. Film to be followed by a Q&A with Chopra and a performance by musicians Gary Grundei and Amy Shelley of High Fiction.
Serena Chopra and Kasey Ferlic’s film, Dogana/Chapti, presents narratives of identity, family and sociopolitical perspectives from queer Indian and Indian-American women and non-binary gender folks. The film’s title comes from the 18th century Urdu feminist poetic form, the rekhti, which inspects sexual desires between women and employs terms like “dogana,” used to designate a woman’s self-chosen female friend and “chapti,” a term denoting the rubbing and clinging of female-to-female intercourse.
As recipients of the 2018 Arthyve’s Archives as Muse Orphan Film Grant, Chopra and Ferlic’s film will debut on November 4th at the Denver Film Festival.
“Mother Ghosting,” a film triptych by Serena Chopra, explores the energies and pulses of the feminist poetic line through the gendering of sound/speech/song and matrilineal mythologies, observing menstruation as a kind of mother-daughter blood-line that holds the resistance and fury of patriarchally-induced traumas.
GENDERED SENSES, featuring the work of Shayna Cohn, Marsha Mack, and Carin Rodenborn and curated by Alison J. Leedy, questions the duality of femininity/masculinity as it is interpreted through sensory awareness of both inanimate objects and human beings. Through installations and scented sculpture, dialogue is created surrounding the visual and tactile experience of femininity as it is stereotypically interpreted (or misinterpreted) through the lens of popular culture. Sound art and poetry present the auditory perspective of learning to decode gender solely through speech and song. In creating a space that heightens the “feminine experience” artists seek to satirize and subvert limited notions of gender binaries.
Friday, October 12 | Opening reception and the debut screening of Serena Chopra’s new film | 7-10
Saturday, October 13 | Open hours | 12-3
Sunday, October 13 | Open hours | 12-3
For accessibility information and other inquiries contact GEORGIAartspace@gmail.com.
Image from Shayna Cohn’s installation
Serena Chopra at Jaipur Literary Festival
Narratives of Power, Songs of Resistance moderated by Aruni Kashyap: Serena Chopra joins a panel with Jovan Maya and Franklin Cruz on Sunday, September 23rd at 2:30-3:30 at the Boulder Public Library
In an Interview with Denver Westword’s, Susan Froyd, Serena Chopra discusses duende as visionary practice, the challenges of being a queer femme artist of color in Denver, her love for dance parties, Denver artists she admires and much more.
Don’t miss Denver’s month-long celebration of experimental dance, writing and film! The Unseen Festival is a Denver gem! On Saturday, September 1st @ 7:30 pm @ Counterpath, Serena Chopra opens the festival with a dance piece she choreographed, set to a self-composed a soundscape.
Serena Chopra is featured in the March 2018 issue of Harper’s Bazaar India’s 9th anniversary issue, which spotlights the ways women are taking control of global conversations about women.
Chopra shared her perspective on voice, trust and courage in activism:
As an artist, I am always in the process and practice of listening. Lately, with recent movements and affirmations of female and queer bodies and voices in public spaces, it has become important for me to also recognize my duty, as a woman who has nurtured space for her voice, to speak into the struggle something nurturing, empowering and affirmative—something worthy of listening. Often these notes are chaotic—cacophony into cacophony—but I trust that landing in other’s hearts, minds, bodies, they will begin to arrange themselves toward sense—women and other oppressed bodies will begin to re-imagine ourselves as the future and not secondary to it.
In this image, I find myself, like many other women, at the threshold—between the interior and exterior, the self and the world, love and rage, vision and re-vision, past and subjunctive tenses, the fragile orders of institutions and the chaotic momentums of change. This ambitious movement over the threshold is depicted in my hair, which follows and trails me in all my moments, holds the winds that rustle me, echoes the gestures that I manifest, transforms in the waters that refresh it; the daylight exposes the vulnerability of my face—one’s vulnerability in having to face the world and the light, our mortality in the face of it all. In the image I am behind an open window, thinking of Jean-Paul Sartre: “There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.” And I recognize that progress is not graceful or lovely—it is territory, and women and marginalized folks must claim it as our own.
On Thursday, December 7th Serena Chopra will be reading from her work-in-progress and speaking on queerness and the myth of postcolonialism for the Warhawk Reading and Lecture Series at the University of Wisconsin Whitwater.
MEMORY IS A FUTURE TENSE is a collaboration between artist Lu Cong and poet Serena Chopra. The artist and poet create separately and practice chance operations in pairing a line of text with an image – the converging conversation between image and text, between line and figure, situates memory as a future potential of unexpected and unpredictable interactions.
The dependency of text on image and image on text demonstrates that the interpretation of form, and thus identity, relies on necessary but transient encounters.
Read more about the collaboration and Order one-of-a-kind, original compositions here.
Join a stellar line-up of featured artists, including Quenton Baker, Serena Chopra and Jayy Dodd, October 5th-8th in Nampa, Idaho for the Death Rattle Writers Festival!
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