Research Focus Group Film Screening: Does Your House Have Lions

“An archive of friendship – near, far and displaced.” Filmed over six years, following Delhi-based poet, teacher and activist vqueeram and a group of friends living together in New Delhi, Does Your House Have Lions (48 min., 2021) invites us into a world of queer kinship, love and joy, experienced amidst—and in resistance to—the inequalities of caste, patriarchy, religion and fascism.

Vishal Jugdeo is an interdisciplinary artist who works with video, installation, performance, and sculpture to construct experimental approaches to narrative. He has exhibited widely including solo exhibitions at the ICA Philadelphia, LAXART, Los Angeles, Western Front, Vancouver, and 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica. Commissioned works have been featured in Performa, New York, and Made in LA at the Hammer Museum. Jugdeo is a 2015 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and has received major project funding from the Canada Council for the Arts. Jugdeo is Assistant Professor in New Genres in the UCLA Department of Art.

vqueeram is a writer, researcher, and teacher. They are interested in sex, feeling, and living/dying in their relations with forms of sociality, law, and politics. At the Center for Law and Policy Research, Bengaluru, vqueeram teaches a course on intersectionality for various law schools in the country, and participates in research and policy work on the rights and concerns of the trans community in India. In their writing, vqueeram pays attention to the practices of imagination and freedom of queer/trans persons; whether building a life in a cemetary in Delhi, or in life writing—cinematic, authorial, and political. vqueeram’s writing has been featured in The Shortline Review, The White Review, Frieze, Huffington Post India, Akademi Magazine, and The Wire among other publications and contexts.

There will be a post-screening discussion on Zoom with filmmakers Vishal Jugdeo and vqueeram moderated by Cathy Thomas, Asst. Professor in English & Creative Writing at UCSB.

Admission is free. To register to attend the in-person screening or the virtual post-screening discussion, please visit the Carsey-Wolf Center event page.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Caribbean Studies Research Focus Group and the Carsey-Wolf Center