Steering Into Humor: MFA Summer Lecture Series with Falaks Vasa

Initially, art was a medium through which Falaks Vasa (they/she) was building awareness of her various identities and working to consciously to disrupt and resist the othering, the marginalization, of people like herself. “But now,” she says, “that’s taking much more of a back seat as my art has evolved. It’s the ways that I move through the world that feel like activism, resistance. I am a trans femme person, I am brown, I’m from Kolkata so I am an immigrant,” she says. “Just living my life is a way of upsetting the spaces I move through.”

How has their creative process changed? These days, says the multidisciplinary artist, who has exhibited everywhere from Italy to Ireland, India, Canada, and the Netherlands, “when I’m making creative work it feels extremely easy and fun. When it feels like I’m trying to do something or make something happen, it no longer quite works for me. In the past couple of years I have really steered into humor and into this way of being where I don’t take my art too seriously and just allow it to happen. It’s still informed by all those ideas, but now they’re more natural as opposed to maybe a little bit forced.”

That artistic evolution is part of what Falaks will be touching on during her talk as part of this summer’s MFA Lectures Series on Thursday, July 18, 4:30 PM, at MassArt’s Design and Media Center (DMC) Lecture Hall. She will also be reading from her first novel, Shor, which translates to “noise” in Hindi, as well as showing pieces from different stages of her artistic development. 

One of them, Double-Diamond Decolonizer, was completed “at a time that I was thinking a lot about the relationships between cartography and colonialism,” they say. Colonizers divide the world into grids and places they can point to and name and say they have control over. By contrast, the double diamond, based on the Jain world view of Falaks’ upbringing, has no specific grids to show what can be conquered. “That project,” they say, “ended up becoming a lot about refusal and thinking about how to make things illegible, opaque, to my audience, which at that time was a western one.”

Falaks will discuss, too, her approach to teaching. “My pedagogy is very interdisciplinary,,” she says. “Sometimes I feel like I’m performing. Sometimes I feel like I’m curating. But the classes I teach are part of my creative practice.”

All MFA lectures are free, open to the broader MassArt community and the public. For more information about the MFA summer lecture series, visit the MassArt Events Calendar.