ON THE CUSP OF THE EIGHTH DAY: Celebrating 9 years of Aravani Art Project

Gallery XXL is thrilled and honored to announce ON THE CUSP OF THE EIGHTH DAY, the first solo exhibition of Aravani Art Project opening on January 9, 2025 during Mumbai Gallery Weekend. 

ON THE CUSP OF THE EIGHTH DAY, summons the life and works of Aravanis, the transgender community in India, through the Aravani Art Project – a trans and cis women art collective. Celebrating the 9 years of the collective’s art practice and praxis, the exhibition presents canvases, photographs, testimonies and narratives that work towards the bringing down of severe discrimination, social stigma and systemic inequality faced by the Transgender Community in India through the medium of art as its vehicle, voice, and tool to create a space for intersectional voices in the society. 

The title of the exhibition finds its root in the story of Aravan’s sacrifice, the central deity of Aravanis. This sacrifice, which is necessary for the victory of Pandavas in the 18 day war of Kuruskshetra in the epic of Mahabharata, becomes a pivotal point for the transgender community to commune together in the month of Chaitra (April/May), and celebrate the 18 day Koovagam festival. The festival holds a ceremonial marriage of Iravan to the people of the community and is followed by their widowhood after the ritual re-enactment of Iravan's heroic death on the eighth day of the war. 

With this threshold on the eighth day of a war where a sacrifice is necessary for a new beginning, the curation puts forth different dualities at the stroke of midnight – binding the doubleness of how gender, gender identity, gender expression and sexuality is conceived, perceived and lived. Collapsing days and nights, individuals and communes, home and the world, cosmos and dreams that exist in the undergrounds and subcultures to crack open dreams and constellations that exist on streets, in homes, on mirrors and bodies, these dualities become guiding impulses for co-existence; ultimately provoking a fold in reflections, identities, and norms that entail the society.

In the confines of Gallery XXL, the Aravanis come with joy, resistance and pride to expand the meanings of desires into modes of survival, the meanings of belonging with respect to chosen families, the meanings of work vis-a-vis art, unabashed expressions, the body, and the meanings of art into praxis, culture work and living.