Hekh hosted a reading of the unpublished essay by zeropowercut "THE UNSPOKEN TABOO OF ART OR WHY THE UNINTELLIGIBLE IS CRUCIAL FOR ANNIHILATION OF CASTE" and an installation on 17th December, 2025.
Abstract:
Caste-categorisation of workers as ‘sudras’, which means unknowledgeable and menial, not only disenfranchises the workers as creators of things and knowledge, but also dissociates the notions of work and knowledge from each other. If experience and expression are understood as interdependent processes in the action of knowing and making real, what this dissociation entails is a severance of the sudra-fied people from their reality. While this dissociation stems from the need of the hegemony to manufacture oppression, the essay explicits how this dissociation is sustained in the mundane by non-recognition of creation as productive actions of knowledge. Bereft of the very concept of cultural agency, while general society detests acts of creation or art, the art-world limits the emancipation of anti-caste discourse by not allowing aspects of oppressed-caste lives that are not immediately intelligible. Thinking of art not as a mirror of reality, but something that forms the real by bridging experience and expression, the essay discusses how access to cultural agency for people is crucial for the annihilation of caste.
