title: phool/fool

media: video/performance

duration: 6:10

year: 2021

context: ‘phool/fool’ takes up failure as glitch, and explores the slippage of language between phool (‘flower’ in Hindi) and ‘fool’ (both nicknames I’ve been given). It claims foolery as a queer strategy of resistance, and posits it as a complex and deeply intentional technique that ‘requires fooling itself into thinking it’s not’. This work has pedagogically birthed courses such as ‘Queer Strategies of Resistance: Fools, Tricksters, Shapeshifters’. Something slips. Something fails. Nothing is revealed, but someone has been fooled. Is it you? Girl, why are you asking me? I don’t know!

words on the work by curator, adwait singh: “this playful video by falak vasa demonstrates what the author jack halberstam has theorised as the ‘queer art of failure’, where failure marks an alternative possibility for being, loving, and doing outside the constraining and traditional bounds of success. this idea of failing nobly comes to us through any number of love songs and is owned by subjects often voicing a marginalised experience. the figure of the fool has also been deployed in literature as a critical device, or as a mirror unto the sovereign, a constant reminder of the constructions and performativity inherent within institutions of power, a helpless herald of ominous truth and an introducer of error into the normative scheme of things. the work self-consciously (mis)performs all these identities, bumbling and failing at every step and valiantly starting over. in doing so, it makes a parody of its own plot, interrupts its own progression, keeping faith only with its driving logic of failure. the crossover between the homonymous fool and phool (flower in hindi) and the deliberate muddling of these two can be interpreted as an avowal of foolery as a time-tested, queer strategy of self-production and meaning-making outside the heteronormative code of reproductive futurity. when love, future and success are possibilities that are foreclosed then the only thing left to do is to take pleasure in failing and raise it into an art form, the work seems to offer. by making one feel for the fool, ‘phool/fool’ attempts to fool the importunate feeling of failure.”