Queer Sites in South Asia: Cruising and Worldbuilding in India and Sri Lanka’s Gardens and Beaches

Join anthropologist Dr Brian A. Horton (Brandeis University) and art historian Dr Edwin Coomasaru (University of Bristol) for a discussion of queer sites in South Asia, from gardens to beaches, to mark Salman Toor’s exhibition Someone Like You (2026-27) at the Courtauld.

Gardens and beaches are some of the few publicly available sites to wander. Their lanes are sites where people from across a city’s different strata might meet, socialize, or at the very least loiter collectively. Both sites, especially public ones, are often associated with heterosexual and natal family forms: locations of leisure, places of play for children, built environs for respite against hetero-capitalist time. But wandering gardens and beaches is not just for kids, for families, or for the idealized heterosexual couple. Each are also important landscapes in global histories of queer subculture. This face is often sub rosa, lit underneath the roses. It demands ways of seeing, touching, and feeling that call on collective sensibilities (e.g. hankies and coded handshakes) as much as an attunement to otherness: other bodies, other possibilities, other sensibilities. They demand practices of reading (and being read) spaces, bodies, and intentions ambivalently. Someone Like You, Toor’s first European institutional solo show, probes similar zones of uncertain possibility through the queer and immigrant subjects of his works. Wandering with Toor across the ambivalent gardens of his portraiture, this event’s speakers entangle their own paths, following queer sites of South Asia. Coomasaru will discuss artists Chathuri Nissansala and Mahen Perera’s queer ecological imaginaries of Lunuganga’s private gardens and Colombo’s public beaches, while Horton will trace gay men’s performances of touch public cruising sites across Bombay as an alternate archive of queer emergence in India.

Organised by Elena Crippa (Senior Curator of Contemporary Art) and Leyla Arrianne Bumbra (Head of Research Forum) at The Courtauld.