Shrines and Rituals exhibition opening

Join us for the opening of Shrines and Rituals Thursday, June 18 from 6pm to 8pm! Enjoy refreshments as we revel in Arjun Lal’s solo exhibition. On view until August 1, Shrines and Rituals is an adaptation of sacred Indian stories that speculates new narratives, relationships, and other ways of being. Informed by their lived experiences navigating contemporary queer culture as a person from Indian ancestry, Lal investigates role-play.

“Throughout my life, I have moved through many roles, alongside others performing theirs, a continuous choreography of expectation, negotiation, and consent. When roles harden—when I am trapped in one, or others cling too tightly to theirs—sensation becomes constricted, reduced to the repetitions of role-specific instructions. While I am alive, I want to feel as much as possible, to inhabit the fullness of experience. I wonder: do repeated sensations disintegrate, intensify, or peak?

I am compelled by the possibility of liberating, reimagining, and fluidly exchanging roles, opening wider pathways to sensation and intimacy. What new desires, pleasures, and intimacies might emerge if vulnerability, curiosity, and consent guide performance rather than hierarchy or tradition?”

–Arjun Lal

Lal will be in attendance for the exhibition opening. We’re excited to welcome you!

Learn more about the artist and exhibition at:

https://grunt.ca/exhibitions/shrines-and-rituals/