If you’ve been on the Indian corners of the internet over the last decade and are interested in either art or social justice, it’s likely that you have come across Priyanka Paul, who goes by the handle @artwhoring on social media. Priyanka is a multidisciplinary artist from Mumbai, India. Their work draws from their lived experiences and is informed by queer and Ambedkarite anti-caste sensibilities.
Priyanka’s artwork features dizzyingly bright colours and gender-ambivalent bodies—beautiful, monstrous—with consistent references to Ambedkarite literature, art, and pop culture. The tone is defiant, angry and speaks directly to young people.
Their unwavering commitment to speak against the oppression wrought by gender and caste has earned them a fan following, but at a deep cost. Every day, the comment sections on their social media handles pile up with blatant casteism and queerphobia. Priyanka, however, is undeterred.
“People use my art as wallpapers on their phone,” Priyanka once told me. “That is an image they choose to wake up to and it means everything.”
The American feminist intellectual, Audre Lorde, in her essay Uses of Anger, speaks about the radical and generative force that anger holds for Black women, especially in the context of being able to recognise social injustice. Borrowing from that idea, I spoke with Priyanka about the role of anger in their work.
How and why did you take to art? And why digital illustration in particular?
I started illustrating on my mother’s old phone that she no longer used. My sister found an app called MediBang Paint, which was the perfect place to start. It was really fun to explore and figure out, and once I started I couldn’t stop.
I have always drawn, but I found this make-shift digital art at a time when I was at St. Xavier’s [College, in Mumbai]. I was surrounded by students who came from international schools and had debate classes and Model United Nations and what not, things I hadn’t been exposed to previously. They were all really articulate. Words would come flowing out of their mouths at the speed of a train engine. I didn’t feel like I could express myself, which is when I took to drawing and doodling and converting a lot of those drawings into digital art. I’ve always been funny and that humour translated well into art.
I also like that digital art is so forgiving. I can make as many mistakes and keep erasing. I don’t have to buy new materials to make it, and I can make it anywhere. I was professionally illustrating by 17. I had an illustrated column in DNA at that age. I remember I’d draw on my local train journey, in the classroom, in the canteen.
Digital art possesses this ability to be exchanged and shared so easily, from one screen to another, at the click of a button. I also started making digital art at the dawn of the era of memes. Soon you’re already sort of competing with the introduction of digital images that can traverse different internet worlds and create their own momentum. Navigating that has always been very interesting.
Your work seems to speak to many different kinds of people and is widely circulated on social media. How important is it for you that your work is seen by lots of people?
Every artist hopes for their work to be seen by lots of people, of course. I think I definitely started out wanting my work to appeal to as many people as possible. Now I’d settle for fewer people seeing my work, but actually understanding it.
I think the harm that comes from your work being widely viewed, but not necessarily understood, is that it can really cause ruptures in your identity. Those of us who are queer or choose to live life in whatever alternative way always seem to find our beings clashing and being made to bend to the idea that the world wants. It can be lonely often.
I now want to remind myself that I understand myself, even when others don’t. So, I can continue to make art that is reflective of who I am and not let an audience tell me what it is that they want me to reflect to them. I do however, want to pride myself on making work that speaks directly to people, without making some lofty, overcomplicated, barely noticeable supposedly radical references.
Where do you draw inspiration from in the feminist, queer, and anti-caste movements? What ideas are you simultaneously moving away from?
From the world around me, from my friends, from the books I read, the leaders and personalities I hear stories about, the media I consume. To be queer, avarna, feminist means you know secrets about the world others don’t care to know about unless you’re “educating” them with it. It feels like there are constantly truths and secrets of the world hiding in plain sight for you to uncover and make sense of the world. Every time you find them, the world makes so much more sense. Every time I uncover these histories and facts that are not as widely circulated, it registers for me as something that gives shape to my world. Then I make art about how it makes sense to my world.
I’m always trying to move away from ideas that require you to soften yourself and make art palatable in a way that does injustice to the ideas and legacies that I want to take forward. I want to move away from politeness. I want to move away from a ‘demanded’ perfection. I want to move away from this current culture of narcissistic self-promotion that social media demands of you. That’s all me me me me me and has no concern for the collective, for building artistic expression as something we all participate in. I want to move away from short attention spans and sermonising.
We have spoken in the past about anger as a productive, radical force especially for people denied justice. How does anger drive your work?
I must say I miss my anger. It was this bludgeoning force that really championed my work for me. I think anger for me was this surge in my bones that drove me to make loud work about the things I deeply love. I often find anger to be my strongest expression of love. There’s so much speculation these days on ‘being seen.’ Inarguably, as an artist, my main work is ‘to be seen.’ My anger held me steadfast, it empowered me in this gruelling being-seen process. I was me and I was angry enough to be me and keep being me.
Anger also has a deep psychic cost that is both personal and collective. How have you experienced this?
Anger has a cost, in the sense of how much people will punish you for being angry.
For a while now, I’ve not been able to be angry—in real life or in the form of any tangible artistic expression. I’ve written before that to be angry is also a privilege. In life, you might come across the kind of wounding that leaves you in so many pieces. It becomes difficult to then ignite any sort of anger that doesn’t immediately crumble into a very weakening sort of grief.
But I have always known anger to be transformative. I know it will transmute. If my love can be anger, then I’m waiting and hoping now for my anger to hold a lot of grief, shame, and pain and to alchemise all of that into something new. I don’t know why but that’s the sort of belief I have in anger. Though I might not possess a lot now, I put my belief in it.
Women and gender non-conforming folks are often asked to ‘rise above’ oppressive situations. What are the ways in which your art practice hits back at this expectation?
I believe I’ve always allowed my art to be human, to be me, to be unpolished in a way that the elite may consider ‘uncouth,’ to be very in your face. I’ve been told I lack ‘subtlety’ and yes, I very proudly do. In a world that minces words to dust, I am hoping for my art to be charred meat on a plate. I am not interested in rising above situations, for me to have to rise above means I have already been perceived as being subjugated under something. I’m not rising above anywhere. I’m right here, everyone else can fly or swim above or below. I’m rigid about fluidity. You will be made to reckon with water that flows but not where you want it to.
There is a sense of play that is consistent through your works. The theme of ‘girlhood’ shows up often. A lot of your earlier zines are also evocative of childhood, woven through glitter, hot pink, and a nod to punk. What does this sensibility mean to you?
It just means me. It’s all I’ve ever loved: hot pink, glitter, bold graphics. My meaning-making process in my brain is about always scanning for what the world devalues, what it tries to label as “less-than.” I explore the world through those things. I reverse the “devalu-fication,” I don’t care that you see it as “unvaluable” because I will see it as invaluable. Girlhood is always seen as disposable, or lacking in seriousness or importance. But I truly believe this girlhood or even the aesthetic of it is one that to me means liberation, a freedom. The first kind of freedom little girls have to yearn for, the first kind made accessible through frilly socks and glitter pens and shiny stickers.
How do you negotiate the commercial, economic aspect of art with being politically dissident?
Awfully. I’m downright awful at it, which is disappointingly not a virtue. I have always had to balance doing bland work, even de-fang my own work and artistic sensibilities to keep doing commercial work or to enter commercial spaces. I do it with the constant thought at the back of my mind, that you have to do this, so you can get to do the work you really want to do. I wish this whole process could be made better for artists by people who believe in us.
Years of the “leftist” children on the internet taking digs at me, have also demonised money to me. These knuckleheads sound like they think touching money makes you evil. That made me believe that I shouldn’t be making any money at all. I’ve had to reintroduce to my brain the idea that you do need money, and you do need capital to build good and important things. So I’m really trying to find the balance between doing the work that keeps me financially secure, but also the work that truly echoes my voice without diluting it. These are not two separate things. They kind of go hand in hand.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Photo (courtesy of Priyanka Paul)