| Summary/Abstract |
Sa’dia Rehman’s Lotah Stories was an art installation that was exhibited in the bathrooms of Queens Museum of Art in New York during the 2005 Fatal Love show, the first exhibition on South Asian American art in a major venue. Given its unusual placement outside the white cube, one’s encounter with Lotah Stories is jarring. Moreover, Rehman’s crass subject matter incites carnivalesque laughter. This article argues that Rehman’s aesthetics give form to the dissent of play; by situating Rehman within the age of identity art and the emergence of South Asian diasporic art from the 1990s onwards, I maintain that attention to play as a political aesthetic can reshape the way we see difference.
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