Aparna T

This Foundation Project, implemented by IFA under Explorations will explore how personal archives and stories of mothers and daughters can be translated through feminist storytelling, in the form of a graphic narrative that can be transposed onto a spatial installation, as a “living zine”. Aparna T is the Coordinator for this project. 

Aparna T is a multidisciplinary visual artist, illustrator, and comic writer based in Kochi, Kerala. Aparna’s artistic practice spans animation, comic writing, visual design, and multimedia storytelling, frequently focusing on gender, women’s lives, and social issues. Aparna did a B. Des in Fashion Communication from NIFT Kannur and an M.Des in Animation Film Design from NID Ahmedabad. Aparna has published the sci-fi satire comic Miss Android Vol 1, which was exhibited at the Indie Comix Fest. Given her experience, Aparna T is best placed to be the Project Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA.

The project will include the making of a “living zine” through spatialised graphic narrative, for feminist storytelling that will explore the dynamics of mother-daughter relationships, and inter-generational trauma, examining how maternal identity is constructed through patriarchal societal expectations, sacrifice, and unexpressed grief, forcing daughters into a complex pattern of enmeshment, resistance and inherited emotional silence. Aparna’s household has the presence of dozens of cats raised across three generations of women, grandmother, mother, and daughter, that is at the core of this artistic investigation, as a deeply personal dimension of the project. The cats are present as an alternative channel of communications, within a household lacking direct mode of interactions. The cats, as a set of domestic organisms, absorb unarticulated love, tension, resentment, shielding the women from direct confrontation, while simultaneously maintaining physical proximity. It artistically raises questions about how feminine emotional worlds are contiguous with the sensitivity map of a set of feral organisms that inhabit human domesticity. 

The artistic process will involve Aparna’s practice expanding beyond printed graphic narratives and comics, transposing these feminist narratives into an immersive, spatial environment described as a “living zine.” The installation will have segmented architectural panels to divide space into three distinct generational perspectives, inviting viewers to physically navigate the in-betweenness of memories. The spatial dimensions of the living zine will blend acrylic paintings, photography, text fragments, and material traces with light, ambient soundscapes, sculptural and projected cat figures, as a space that mirrors the absurd realities of familial inheritance. The project has a broader scope of gathering stories from diverse women, to test the universality of these relational patterns, and the project will lead to an open studio and participatory zine-making.  

The outcome of the project will be a “living zine”, including a graphic narrative, through objects and space, as a spatial installation of feminist storytelling, and an open studio event. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA along with the final report will be an artistic archive scrapbook, a zine/ mini comic, and visual documentation of the artistic process.   

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Arts Practice programme in the manner in which it attempts to create an interactive space of sisterly solidarities, cognitively distributed into a spatial experience of graphic narrative, through feminist storytelling, as a fiercely honest look at complex female blood relationships, inner psychological lives, to collectively capture, reflect upon, and disrupt inherited social pressures. 

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm by convening an online gathering of artists coordinating Explorations projects. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees.