At Indian Summer Festival, a utopian village and driftwood installation offer reflections on life's paradoxes
At Ocean Artworks, artist Kimira Reddy unveils her ceiling-suspended work Drift and curator Nhylar hosts Jugalbandhi: Village Dreamscapes
Nhylar. Photo by Seenu Yellapu
Kimira Reddy. Photo by Melissa Meyer
Indian Summer Festival presents Jugalbandhi: Village Dreamscapes on July 5 from 7:30 pm to 10:30 pm, and Drift in partnership with Boca del Lupo from July 6 to 14, both at the Ocean Artworks pavilion on Granville Island
FOR SEVERAL MONTHS NOW, artist Kimira Reddy has been strolling the shorelines near her home on the Sunshine Coast in search of driftwood.
A primary destination for her collection treks is Bonniebrook Beach, a beloved sunset-viewing spot in Gibsons that’s characterized by its uninterrupted stretches of sand and wave-smoothed stones. Sometimes, Reddy tells Stir over a Zoom call, she finds the perfect piece of weathered driftwood to incorporate into her upcoming multimedia installation, Drift; other days, her only option is an eroded log too large to carry.
On display at the Ocean Artworks pavilion on Granville Island from July 6 to 14 for this year’s Indian Summer Festival, Drift is being presented by Boca del Lupo as part of its intimate Micro Performance Series. Suspended from the ceiling, the visual tableau incorporates a medley of vibrant materials—fabrics, threads, flowers, driftwood—that visitors can view while seated on beautifully ornate Indian carpets sourced by Reddy, as if they’re looking up at a sprawling tree.
There will also be an ongoing interactive component to Drift. Guests can write messages on pieces of ribbon, and then tie them to the installation wherever they please. Plus, there will be a variety of instruments scattered around the space for folks to try a hand at playing, allowing the sound design to constantly evolve.
Speaking to Stir over a Zoom call before the installation’s unveiling, Reddy explains that Drift is a personal exploration of her history and culture. It takes an ethereal look at life’s paradoxes (which is also the theme of this year’s Indian Summer Festival): entanglements of driftwood represent growth and decay, allowing for a deep sense of introspection.
“Going through life, there’s always different emotions,” Reddy tells Stir. “You cannot always be happy. You can’t always appreciate something without working really hard to achieve it or to get to a certain place. So one of the things I’m trying to do is to appreciate the beauty in the threads, by having the rawness in the decay of the driftwood. And I think in life, that’s just the journey of it. You’ve got to go through all these different phases of life: whether it’s ups or downs, it’s all part of who we are and how we navigate the world and our emotions. And I think that’s something that’s pretty strong in this piece.”
Detail shot of Kimira Reddy’s Drift installation.
Primarily a set designer by trade, in recent years Reddy has imagined artful decor for theatre shows spanning Vancouver Opera’s lush take on Georges Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, Gavan Cheema’s immigrant-centred play Himmat, and Manami Hara’s Courage Now, which tells the true story of a Japanese vice-consul’s bravery during the Second World War. She often incorporates virtual reality into her practice, using the discipline as a tool to help imagine and map out projects before bringing them into the physical world.
This isn’t Reddy’s first time exhibiting at the Indian Summer Festival; in 2022, she was the fest’s feature artist, and presented her installation Under the Banyan Tree at Ocean Artworks. She says that people reacted to that piece, which was inspired by the infinitely stretching banyan trees of India, with a multitude of emotions and energies: some folks were happy and laughing, while others were sad and crying. A few people took naps, breastfed their newborns, practised yoga, or played instruments. Ultimately, the installation was unique to whatever each visitor desired, and the same holds true for Drift.
“Everyone can come in and experience the space for themselves,” Reddy says. “There’s this room to play, and I’m holding that space for people to come in and experience it in any way that they want.”
Drift will be set up at Ocean Artworks just in time for another Indian Summer Festival event at the same venue, Jugalbandhi: Village Dreamscapes, which will take place on the evening of July 5. A utopian take on the jugalbandhi—which is traditionally a freestyle Indian classical music performance between two instrumentalists—the celebration will feature a selection of roaming performers with the rustic style of a panchayat, the local self-governing system used in many rural Indian villages.
When Stir touched base with the event’s curator Nhylar in a separate interview before the Indian Summer Festival, they shared that the goal with the event was to blend ancient and futuristic worlds by making a conventional village setting more inclusive.
Nhylar grew up in the mid-sized central Indian city of Indore, where they lived until they moved abroad at 18. A highlight of the curator’s childhood was a nearby theme park designed to look like a small version of a traditional Rajasthani village.
“They would have puppet dancers, magicians, a little market, typical Rajasthani-village cuisine, different types of dances, a fortune teller who sits by a tree, camel rides, and things like that,” Nhlyar tells Stir over the phone. “Everything you would associate with village life in an amusement park. I would love going there growing up, it was just a fun weekend family outing. So that’s something that I’ve always kind of had close to my heart. And I think just being queer and working with so many different queer artists, I’ve always wanted to find a way to make both of those worlds collide in an interesting way.”
Nhylar, a gender non-conforming artist who has been based in Canada since 2019, works across mediums spanning storytelling, poetry, and visual arts. In Vancouver, they have curated events for the likes of Queer Mango Collective, Transgender Expressions Haven, and Queer Arts Exchange.
Curtis Andrews. Photo by Diane Smithers
Simran Sachar, aka Simziez. Photo by Maya Francis
Jugalbandhi: Village Dreamscapes will transform the Ocean Artworks pavilion with Indian-style furniture and hay bales to take a seat on, and monitors playing retro-psychedelic old Bollywood clips created by Public Ganja. Four performers will pop in and out of the space: bansuri flute player and vocalist Hasheel fusing classical South Asian sounds with electronic and hip-hop beats; DJ and multidisciplinary artist Osheen Siva mixing Afro-Desi and Baile-funk music; Punjabi-Marathi street dancer Simziez (Simran Sachar) performing freestyle waacking and contemporary; and mridangam percussionist Curtis Andrews providing a backdrop of beats.
Each of the artists will improvise within their respective mediums, responding to each other and playing off the vibe of the room, to create what Nhylar describes as a surreal fusion of traditional and modern energies.
Of course, a village festival wouldn’t be complete without food and drinks (both of which are included with the purchase of a ticket to Jugalbandhi). Kalai’s Curry Kitchen food truck will be serving up Indian street-food bites, from tangy puffed-rice bhel puri to fried-potato vada pav sliders, and a brand-new pop-up, Alai Coffee, will offer traditional South Indian filtered coffee with a modern cold-brew twist.
“I’m fuelled a lot by community, and healing, and bringing people together,” Nhylar says. “As a new immigrant in Canada, I’ve always kind of struggled to build community and to find my own community. So I think it just comes from that passion of building more inclusive spaces for queer Desi folks specifically, and QTBIPOC folks. I think that’s something that really comes through for me—and also just finding different ways of expression to explore the intersection of queer hardships, oppression, and the transcendence that’s found in queer eroticism. That freedom of expression, it means a lot to me, and it’s definitely been very transformative for me to build spaces like this.” 
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