When Angelina Jolie decided to have a preventive double mastectomy to lower her risk of developing breast cancer, opinion was divided. One section of people believed the Hollywood actor did right, while another slammed her decision. Closer home, a Kerala magazine recently stirred up things when its cover showed a woman breastfeeding a baby — the backlash had more to do with an exposed breast hurting sentiments, rather than the related story about Indian women breastfeeding in public. Even celebrities routinely catch flak for putting up on Instagram photographs that show them breastfeeding. Instagram itself censors by blurring exposed boobs. It is precisely this kind of taboo and curiosity surrounding breasts that Kadak, a collective of South Asian women artists working with graphic storytelling, is exploring at the ongoing (August 22-26) Gender Bender festival in Bengaluru. In its fourth year now, the annual event showcases new works of art centred on gender

Kadak had started off with eight artists — Aarthi Parthasarathy, Aindri Chakraborty, Akhila Krishnan, Janine Shroff, Mira Malhotra, Garima Gupta, Pavithra Dikshit and Kaveri Gopalakrishnan — presenting their work at the East London Comic Arts Festival (ELCAF) in 2016. The group has since created art works on gender, politics and feminism, among other subjects, and presented in spaces such as the LA Zine Fest in Los Angeles and National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), Mumbai. It has also founded ‘Reading Room’ — a travelling library of self-published zines, comics and books by its collective of illustrators, graphic designers, filmmakers, writers and multi-disciplinary artists.

At Gender Bender, Kadak has presented a curated set of nine works — graphic stories accompanied by audiovisual art.

Parthasarathy, a writer, filmmaker and creator of the political satire comic Royal Existentials , describes how the subject of breasts led each artist to a different dimension. “It wasn’t always a fetish in India. Today, patriarchy fetishises breasts on women and the hyper-sexualisation is omnipresent. Breasts attract eyeballs in 200 milliseconds and are used to sell virtually everything, including cars, burgers, condoms, even chewing gum. Kritika Trehan’s piece, ‘it’s obsession’, explores this facet. Mira Malhotra’s ‘Babbla Tailors’ looks at this through satirical vintage ads for ‘man-made blouses for women’.”

On the other hand, breasts on men are a cause for embarrassment. Even though male breast reduction surgery is quite common in India now, there is a lot of secrecy around it, says Parthasarathy, who interviewed cosmetic surgeons for the work ‘Guy ne ko kya?, which she created in collaboration with Sanika Palsikar, on the issue of gynaecomastia or male breasts.

Kadak’s project for Gender Bender also explores what it feels like to be born without breasts or to lose them. “While breast cancer is the most common cancer in women worldwide, there is very little discussion about the impact of mastectomy,” she says. Pavithra Dikshit, in her work ‘Boobituary’, attempts to generate a conversation that entails grieving and a sense of loss, the effect on body image, reconstruction surgery, sex and femininity.

‘Kadak’ — meaning strong and sharp — is a term often used to describe tea. The collective’s artists, spread across the globe, want their works to convey their message in a kadak manner; they delve into the aspect of shame and embarrassment associated with breasts and trace the origins to colonialism. “With colonialism came the desire to meet a certain standard of beauty that could be achieved by changing and controlling the way breasts sit on a woman, and thus the bra became ‘essential’. Although, god forbid, someone knows you’re wearing one,” says Parthasarathy.

Finally, there is the ridiculous hypocrisy of shunning something as natural as breastfeeding. The collective found that the absence of honest conversations on the dual nature of breasts — as a source of nutrition and an object of sexual desire — ensured that breasts were seen primarily as sexual, and hence breastfeeding as shameful.

Kadak, which has in the past collaborated with the British Council and Gaysi, among others, believes its work is changing how people perceive India. At ELCAF 2016, Kaveri Gopalakrishnan, who was presenting Kadak’s works, was asked “if they had anything on the Ramayana or Mahabharata”. The limited western view of Indian art had come as a shock to the collective. By the end of the festival, however, Kadak had pretty much sold out its works.

“We are a feminist collective but our work speaks of equality across religion, caste, race et al, so most people can relate. The fact that we are constantly collaborating and creating things with global organisations that do great work, makes our work significant,” Gopalakrishnan says.

The group’s latest work on breasts is yet another dialogue worth having, connecting art to real life and issues like nothing else can.

Runa Mukherjee Parikh is an independent journalist and author

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