International Visitors Programme
At the invitation of W139, Meenakshi Thirukode hosted the Citizen’s Circle, which took place in Amsterdam on 6 July 2024. This public gathering, workshop and collective discussion invited participants to exchange ideas on citizenship and democracy. The Citizen’s Circle opened with a clip from Meenakshi Thirukode’s latest film called 'The Great Intangible: For the love of a politics of love'. It is a two-part video work shown as a part of the Outside the Soup exhibition in W139, and a discussion on the work.
On 9 July 2024, Meenakshi visited Kunstinstituut Melly for a more intimate Citizen’s Circle in collaboration with HipHopHuis. The event was part of Melly’s Teach-In sessions. These voluntary internal staff meetings create space for open conversation, exchange and information sharing. The pressing issues of the current political climate led to different opinions in the group about what the focus of the Citizen’s Circle should be. Should we talk about tools for political activism? Or should the space created simply be a place to sit and discuss political issues, concerns and personal experiences? The event led to deep conversations about solidarity and allyship, and asked participants to think about how these work in turbulent times.
The Citizen’s Circle events focus on engagement through participation, centred on the politics of intimacy that is drawn directly from Meenakshi Thirukode’s own involvement with the MeToo movement in India and other activist work.
Meenakshi Thirukode is a cultural theorist, artist, curator, and above all, a feminist disruptor. Her research focuses on the role of micro-politics, culture, and collectivity from the perspective of a queer femme subjectivity, situated within the domain of a technocapitalist, transnomadic, ephemeral network of individuals and institutions.
These meetings were supported by The Polis Project, a New York-based investigative and journalistic magazine documenting resistance communities, of which Meenakshi is a member.