Queer Unschool South Asia (QUSA) 2026

Application Deadline: accepted on a rolling basis until 28 December, 2025

Unschool Dates: January 24 – February 22, 2026

Location: Patan, Nepal

Apply to queerunschoolsouthasia@gmail.com

Following its first iteration in 2024, we are thrilled to invite applications for participation in Queer Unschool South Asia 2.0, which is scheduled to take place in Patan (Nepal) between January 24 – February 22, 2026. The program is envisioned and organised by curator and writer Aziz Sohail with Hunter/Helena and Promona Sengupta as thought partners, and hosted by the independent art space Kaalo.EkSeyEk. 

What is the Queer Unschool?

The Queer Unschool invites practitioners from South Asia to gather for one month in Patan (Nepal) in a spirit of conviviality, knowledge-sharing, and re-thinking regional imaginaries beyond national borders. We centre the experiences of the participants who hail and live in Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka – artists, activists and thinkers who are doing important and urgent work in their contexts. Up to 8 participants will be selected through this open call.

The selected participants will help inform the pedagogical and learning structure of Queer Unschool by bringing their own lived experiences and thinking alongside programmed workshops and events facilitated by key feminist and queer activists and arts practitioners from South Asia. For the 2026 cycle, workshops will be led by Gudskul (Jakarta), Aziza Ahmed (Karachi/Berlin), Anshika Varma/Offset Projects (Delhi), Yakthung Cho (Nepal), Sharareh Bajracharya (Nepal), Promona Sengupta/Spaceship Beben (Kolkata/Berlin), Hunter/Helena (Nepal) and Stitching Stories (Nepal), amongst others. 

This year our focus is on strategies of cultural organising; DIY radio, sound production, publishing, binding and bookmaking as alternative media; as well as ethical research and practice. By facilitating peer-to-peer curriculum-building of localised knowledge and situated experiences, the school also questions existing models of pedagogical hierarchy, centering collective forms of making and thinking. An engagement with the locality of Patan and communities based in the area allows us to contextualise this programme on site.

We dream that the project will be an experiment in hospitality, offering an alternative infrastructure of working and thriving in the cultural sector, and allowing us to imagine as if we already live in liberated, borderless, unapologetically queer South Asian equitable futures.

Why the Queer Unschool South Asia?

For those of us living in and coming from South Asia, we know the challenges facing our communities. We live amidst rising authoritarianism, ethno-fascism and violence against minorities. We live in an area with some of the most militarised border regimes in the world, preventing us from gathering and being together. We face increasing inequality and precarity amidst oppressive systems, authoritarianism, & climate catastrophes. We continue to witness tremendous and unimaginable crimes and are aware of the importance of calling for action, mobilising solidarities and building circles of care and support. At the same time, we witness the tumbling and turning of regimes and revolutions that keep our communities open to life-changing transitions and change.

Amidst significant challenges, which can prompt feelings of despair, we are heartened and strengthened by the history and presence of those who have organised and sustained our communities for a long time, including the fearless resistance movements and activists in Nepal, Bangladesh, Balochistan, Sri Lanka, Kashmir and beyond, and the artists, writers, curators and change-makers who work everyday to dream and create a liveable, transformed world.

In this mode, we envision the capacity of ‘queer’ as a means of overcoming the unique socio-political challenges of our region. We centre queer as noun, verb, adjective and adverb, in order to embrace its multitudinous possibilities. Following Cuban-American queer theorist José Esteban Munoz’s groundbreaking proposal of queer as ‘a warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality’ – a utopia that can perhaps never be realised but is always possible as ‘a structuring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present’, we imagine that to be queer, to live queerly and to move queerly evokes the varied imaginings and actions of a life and worldview that questions heteronormative conditions and expectations imposed upon us. Queer is also a political identity, having uneasy entanglements with power from the nation state to the globalised art world/market,and having the potential to become a critical and radical force for societal change.

For this school, we are grateful to be hosted by the independent art space Kaalo EkSeyEk in Patan, Nepal. Nepal is the only country in South Asia where all other South Asian passport holders can enter, visa-free, for 30 days without paying a fee. As all South Asian passport holders face acute restrictions to mobility and travel worldwide, we ask, what generative labours could we imagine if we did not have to take on the labour of visa regimes?

What is the offer?

The school is imagined as a space of collective un-making/making and un-learning/learning.

All the participants will be hosted for 1 month at Kaalo.EkSeyEk in shared accommodation, which will allow them to live, cook and work together, and in due time, we hope to form a sense of community. Each participant will be supported with roundtrip transport from a city in South Asia and a per diem of 30,000 NPR for the month. A collective lunch will be served on each day of the workshops, as well as one collective dinner. All local transport costs for programme activities will be covered. In addition, participants will have access to a fund to organise a collective project which will be showcased at the conclusion of Queer Unschool South Asia 2.0 on 21 February 2026.

Who is eligible to participate in QUSA?

Any self-identified emerging artist or cultural worker currently based in South Asia, with a deep commitment to organising feminist and queer engagement and work, and a passion to connect and operate across South Asia’s borders and communities.

We welcome a diverse range of applicants. Cultural workers without formal training or institutional support, and others who might not have access or support for their work, are especially encouraged to apply.

How do I apply?

To apply, we ask you to send us the following to queerunschoolsouthasia@gmail.com – in a single PDF document written in English, or a single audio/video file recorded in English.

1) Your Name and Preferred pronouns

2) In which city are you based in South Asia at the moment?

3) A 200-word introduction to yourself, including your background, experience, artistic or cultural practice and motivations (or up to 3-minute audio/video recording)

4) A 150-word statement on what you hope to learn/unlearn from this gathering (or up to 3-minute audio recording)

5) A 150-word statement roughly proposing what you may contribute towards a collective project (or up to 2-minute audio/video recording)

6)  A 150-word statement on why this is the right time for you to participate in this opportunity (or up to 2-minute audio/video recording)

7) A 150-word statement on what you hope to take back to your community (or up to 2-minute audio/video recording)

*Given the diversity of languages and cultures in South Asia, we do not have the capacity to adjudicate applications in all the languages of our region; however, we understand different capacities of second or third language English and your application will not be assessed based on the proficiency of English, but on your practice and your ideas.

Deadline: Applications accepted on a rolling basis with a final deadline of 28 December

Following your application, we will shortlist applications and invite a short interview to better understand each other, so we can shape this project together, before we make the final selection.

We aim to inform all participants of our final selection by 2 January.

In our region and context of South Asia, we understand the need for flexibility, so if you feel like you are struggling to meet this deadline, do get in touch, and we will do our best to accommodate you. 

How are you being funded/supported?

In the spirit of Queer Unschool, we also want to undo the hegemony of funding regimes that informs much of our art work in South Asia and in general, the Global South.

For Queer Unschool South Asia 2026, about 50% of the support comes from a generous grant from Foundation for Arts Initiatives, a small foundation registered in the United States. Support is also being provided from the Curatorial Practice PhD programme at Monash University, and Aziz Sohail is investing some of their own funds from their teaching income during their PhD. To make up the remainder, grants are being contributed through personal friendships, and an ifa grant will support the travel of Promona and Aziza from Berlin.

As much as possible, we have tried to be ethical in our funding. We seek to redistribute our resources horizontally and welcome all participants into a spirit of mutual aid with a commitment towards the idea ‘from each according to their ability to each according to their needs’. This means that, as a financially self-organised Unschool, we welcome those who can fundraise for themselves to chip in and help us redistribute resources to those without the ability and with the need. We will support all participants to the fullest of our ability, mindful of ongoing pressures and unexpected urgencies.

Acknowledgement of Doctoral Research

Queer Unschool South Asia is organised as part of Aziz Sohail’s Curatorial Practice PhD at Monash University, currently titled ‘We Cannot Cross Until We Carry Each Other: Queer Curating as Making Kin in South Asia(s) and its Diasporas’. All participants in the program and their resulting projects will be engaged in this process through open discussion, honesty, and collaboration.

Aziz Sohail is a Pakistani passport-holding curator, writer and a PhD candidate in Curatorial Practice at Monash Art, Design and Architecture. Their research and resultant projects honour and recognise the power of queer and feminist collectivity, sociability, joy and wayward encounter.