I am often haunted by colonial ghosts in places of queer worship. Disguised with adapted military costumes that evoke ethnic oppression and war, their presence feels off-putting. I see them regularly patrolling the places where I seek refuge. Although colonial ghosts emerge in playful and sexy gay environments, I find myself unable to play their games.

Ghosts are not autonomous. They hold a supernatural power that allows them to spread apart and possess others. Like an infection, their ideas, morals, and agendas inhabit new gay generations that continue their colonial legacy in the physical realm at an increasing rate, I’ve seen them rally at sites in Schöneberg, Berlin and Christopher Street, NYC occupying the streets of neighbourhoods and flailing their floggers as if they are soliciting Christian propaganda that is luring both others into their cult as well as servants who will do as they command.

Why do colonial ghosts continue to linger?

What do they want?

When I discovered the wall between the world that we know and the world beyond what we know I was overcome with a strangeness. I suddenly realized that I am living in an enclosure. How could a life, such a poetic thing, be confined in captivity. Who installed our social and experiential limitations? What is it that keeps us here?

Wherever this is, is there a way out? Perhaps there is an air vent or an underground tunnel? Could there be an open door somewhere?

I have been spending my time staring through glass walls and dreaming about what I might do If I were free. Imagining and fantasizing new sensations outside of what now feels like a zoo. This reality I have found myself in has a complex exterior with layers of codes, barricades, locks, militant guards, and if lucky maybe some glass to gaze through.

I have been dreaming about changing. In my body I have had a longing for other ways of being. A deep yearning to experience how it might feel to break apart my form and rebuild it. Expediting my surface attempting to satisfy a hunger for self-discovery.

How might it feel to be a flamingo?

BIOGRAPHY

Arjun Lal is an interdisciplinary artist based between Kjipuktuk and Berlin. Through playful and otherworldly explorations of identity, experience, and cultural trajectory, Lal uses sculpture and performance to fuel cultural critique, shifts, and possibilities for new ways of being.

In response to their experiences navigating contemporary queer culture as a person from Indian ancestry, Lal’s works are confrontational. Driven by an ongoing desire for a queerer world, his works equip audiences with symbols, colours, shapes, actions, perspective, gestures… fragments of conversations and dreams carefully assembled into social/cultural abstraction.

Lal is fascinated by the roles we inhabit—whether inherited, assigned, assumed, or chosen. They explore the choreography of expectation, sensation, and liberation from the unspoken repetitions of role-specific instructions.

Image: To Be a Flamingo, Performance at John W. Lindsay YMCA Aquatic Centre, Halifax, October 19th, 2024, Documented by Mikiki