Rishi Guné is a diasporic Desi artist, writer, scholar and designer. They have a Bachelor's Degree in American Studies from Vassar College and a Master’s Degree in Asian American Studies from UCLA.
Their research focuses on how discourses of normativity afford Indian American with privilege in the settler-colonial United States. Using literary, archival, and filmic sources, Rishi's current book project is called Shadow Image Figures: Racializing Indian Americans in the Settler-Colonial Imaginary. Their research has been supported by the UCLA Institute of American Cultures, the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, the UCLA Asian American Studies Department, and the Elyse van Dyck Dewitt Fellowship of Vassar College.
Their art examines the limitations of knowledge production in shaping modes of being, affiliation, remembering, difference and privilege in the U.S., India, and the diaspora. Spanning film, screenwriting, creative writing, poetry, digital media, painting, performance, and drawing, they utilize multimedia techniques to critically examine how normativity is produced and sustained in the United States and India. Their work aims to fight against these strictures, particularly through a focus on Indian American diasporic communities. If anything, their artistic work begs the question: how can we stand idly by as others are impacted by systemic oppression? They aim to make art that is an activist force in the ongoing Black, Dalit, Muslim, Indigenous, Latinx and Asian global struggles for liberation from imperial and normative forms of power..
They are currently working on a number of creative projects, including two novels. They are also at work on completing a book of poetry and their first art installation.
Current Projects:
• Shadow Image Figures: Racializing Indian Americans in the Settler-Colonial Imaginary: an academic and artistic interdisciplinary study of legal and journalistic media and literature of the ways in which gender non-conformity produces the criminalization and otherization of South Asian women and trans people. This is my current thesis project (November 2018 – Present).
• On Unknowing: a collection of poetry about gender expression, South Asian diaspora, ancestry, and queerness (January 2017-Present).
• Shanti Energy: a series of multimedia ink paintings about the Divine Feminine in Hindu mythology (January 2018 – Present).
• Unseeing: a novella about processes of belonging for a queer Indian girl in 1986 New York (September 2016 – Present).
Softwares:
Audacity, Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Premiere Photoshop, Adobe Premiere Audition, Google Suite, Microsoft Word Suite, Procreate