The gaze that draws you to the reclining figure between the curtains has a name.

George Chakravarthi’s “Self-Portrait As An Unknown Devadasi” arranges the London-based artist on a bed to evoke the sort of voyeuristic photographs taken for colonizers in India.

Chakravarthi in this image is depicting himself as a devadasi, a traditional class of “affluent temple dancers and preservers and protectors of the arts” which didn’t survive colonization.

“He’s extremely famous in Europe, very shown in all the big galleries,” said Sudharshan Duryappah, part of Toronto’s Queer Tamil Collective.

Yet Chakravarthi has never been in an exhibition in which all the artists are queer and Tamil.

Apparently, apart from participants in a single show in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, no one has.

“It’s never happened in France, never happened in New York, never happened in Zurich,” said Duryappah, the creative and artistic lead for Oor, the QTC Pride Exhibition which launched in June at Scarborough Museum.

The history-making exhibit will run through the end of January, Tamil Heritage Month, and brings out the porous nature of identity and sexuality, which is “not a sealed Tupperware,” he said.

Many Scarborough residents are conservative on sexuality, but the collective wanted the exhibit there because Scarborough is where most of its membership lives.

“This work being here is also empowering for the artists,” said Duryappah, who hopes Oor could later tour.

In the museum’s Kennedy Gallery, Chakravarthi’s work hangs close to the work of queer Tamil artists living in countries where homosexuality is still illegal (Malaysia, Sri Lanka), and in Singapore, where it was decriminalized only last year.

Being at the museum, in buildings and around furnishings from the 19th and early 20th centuries, the show is also “direct commentary on how people of colour take up space in colonial institutions,” Duryappah said.

The museum in Thomson Memorial Park, however, supports QTC and last year hosted the group’s inaugural Tamil queer event in Canada where they created a banner for the Toronto Pride celebration along with pronoun-declaring buttons in Tamil and English for the 2022 festival.

Besides excellence in queer Tamil visual art, the exhibition shows intergenerational trauma caused by repression. In particular, it shows the effects of Black July, a 1983 anti-Tamil pogrom which set off a wave of migration to Canada, creating the largest Tamil diaspora outside South Asia.

Hanging over a window in Cornell House, another museum building is Oor Pogum Megankal, or “The Clouds That Go Home” by Dhiviya Prabaharan.

Born in Canada and an undergraduate at the Ontario College of Art and Design, Prabaharan used batik on fabric to recall “the calm of a nine-year-old boy, my uncle, and a 13-year-old girl, my mother” in their grandmother’s embrace as they travel to safety by boat after the horrors of Black July.

Many people displaced by the pogrom moved away on boats, said Abirami Balachandran, the exhibition coordinator. “The piece speaks to being between the clouds and the sea.”

Oor, she said, is “a multifaceted Tamil word that could mean location, village, home and identity.”

The goal of the multi-layered exhibition is to continue a dialogue where queer Tamil people “can feel seen in ways we want to be seen” and can express ourselves, Balachandran said.

An artist panel is planned for the last quarter of 2023 and the collective is hoping for more programming opportunities at the museum.

The exhibition’s poster was designed by Marvin Veloso from a pencil drawing, “1,2”, by Andil Gosine and Kelly Sinnapah Mary, of a rooster in heels. This work is also part of Oor.