Trans Migrations: Journeys through Art, Architecture, Comics and Gender

media release: A Room of One's Own is thrilled to join the Center for Research on Gender and Women, the South Asian Studies Department, the Center for Visual Cultures, and the Gender Sexuality Campus Center in welcoming Bishakh Som for a lecture and conversation.

A Room of One's Own will have copies of both of Bishakh's books, Apsara Engine and Spellbound, for sale and signing.

This is an in person event at 1310 Sterling Hall.

About the event

Charting my personal history of cultural and geographical displacements, I will propose that such continuous movements have been integral to my reckoning with myself not only as part of a South Asian diaspora, but also as a transgender femme. I will trace how ideas of travel, migration, language and longing for a sense of home/belonging have been crucial to my art-making as it has itself migrated from its roots in comics, through architecture and painting to now roosting firmly back in comics, a medium which has allowed me to integrate these previous endeavors into one practice.

Bishakh Som is an Indian-American trans femme visual artist and author. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Boston Review and The Georgia Review, amongst other publications. Her graphic novel Apsara Engine (The Feminist Press) is the winner of a 2020 L.A. Times Book Prize for Best Graphic Novel and a 2021 Lambda Literary Award winner for Best LGBTQ Comics. Her graphic memoir Spellbound (Street Noise Books) was also a 2021 Lambda finalist.

Bishakh’s artwork has been exhibited at The Society of Illustrators, the Grady Alexis Gallery, De Cacaofabriek, and Art Omi.

You can see her work at www.bishakh.com.