Keerthana Kunnath: Gender, Diaspora, and Visual Agency
Kunnath's work serves as a provocation against heteronormativity, reimagining what it means to be a woman in both contemporary and traditional South Asian society.
Keerthana Kunnath is a London-based visual artist from South India (b. 1995, Calicut) whose photography investigates the intersection of identity, gender, and tradition. As a queer brown woman, Kunnath’s practice operates as a form of self-emancipation, allowing her to navigate the complexities of her South Indian upbringing while establishing a new cultural footprint in the diaspora. Through collaborative portraiture, she gives visibility to marginalised communities while re-examining her own cultural inheritance. Her work acts as a direct provocation against heteronormativity, challenging restrictive ideas of womanhood by interrogating how bodies and narratives are framed.
This critical perspective is shaped by her upbringing in Calicut and Beypore, where growing up within the “joint family” system (a traditional Indian structure in which multiple generations live together) exposed her to constant surveillance and social pressure. This environment, characterised by an implicit “eyes on you” culture, prompted an early awareness of how visibility is regulated and disciplined.
Her best-known documentary photography series, Not What You Saw/Sow, began when, while researching the traditional Indian martial art Kalaripayattu, Kunnath encountered the bodybuilder Arathy Krishna. Struck by the perceived “unprecedented” presence of muscular women within a conservative social context that privileges domesticity and fragility, she undertook a road trip across Kerala to document more than a dozen athletes belonging to a demographic largely absent from mainstream cultural discourse.
The dual title, Not What You Saw/Sow, plays on both the subversion of the gaze (“Saw”) and the labour required to cultivate strength (“Sow”). Traditional South Indian beauty standards emphasise “lightness”, encompassing lighter skin, slender bodies, and suitability for marriage. In contrast, the muscularity and self-possession of these athletes constitute a quiet but profound social provocation, expanding femininity beyond fragility. This pursuit of strength, however, comes with significant personal cost and requires complex everyday negotiations. Many of the women conceal their training to avoid familial disapproval or rejection in marriage prospects, while others hide their practice from landlords due to stigma surrounding non-normative lifestyles.
Kunnath deliberately avoids photographing her subjects in gym environments. Instead, she situates them within familiar Keralan landscapes—beaches, heritage homes, and forests—often dressing them in traditional attire such as the kasavu mundu. This strategy subverts cinematic conventions in which women in similar settings are represented as passive or demure, reconfiguring both space and costume as sites of resistance.
This line of inquiry extends into Kunnath’s broader engagement with queer visibility, representational justice, and the deconstruction of visual rhetoric within postcolonial Indian media. The series Aval (meaning “her”) challenges the heteronormativity of a context in which queer lives are frequently marginalised or rendered invisible. By appropriating familiar visual tropes from Bollywood—where male dominance and “damsel in distress” narratives persist—Kunnath reimagines these compositions through same-sex intimacy, foregrounding tenderness and mutual recognition. In doing so, her collaborators reclaim presence within a visual language that has historically excluded them.
Similarly, Transhome offers an intimate portrayal of transgender communities in Calicut. The series documents the lives of individuals in a "trans home" (Tharavadu), a specific type of community-led housing in Kerala where transgender individuals live together reclaiming "home" as a space of safety and identity rather than one of exclusion or performance. As many residents have been estranged from their families of birth, these homes provide a sanctuary where they can live authentically without societal judgment or the "othering" they face in traditional domestic settings. A major focus of the series is, in fact, the concept of a chosen family where they can find the support and acceptance often denied by their families of birth.
In contrast, Njan anchors the queer South Asian diaspora in London within contemporary visual culture through a hybrid of fashion and documentary aesthetics. Influenced by the work of Sunil Gupta and Nan Goldin, Kunnath continues her collaborative approach, producing images that assert the community’s presence with both intimacy and directness. The series reflects on how geographic displacement does not necessarily dissolve social pressures; rather, diasporic communities often reproduce the cultural expectations of the homeland. These works function as corrective gestures, enabling both artist and subjects to confront and unlearn internalised norms.
Kunnath’s methodology moves fluidly between the personal and the political, shaped by her sense of being an “outsider” within her own familial and cultural context. Her practice combines analogue photography, chosen for its material intimacy, with field recordings that extend the sensory dimension of her work. This is complemented by sustained community engagement through workshops, photowalks, and listening sessions, positioning image-making as a collective process rather than an extractive one.
Ultimately, Kunnath’s work seeks to create conditions in which marginalised subjects can be seen on their own terms. By encouraging young women to question the systems that attempt to categorise them, she frames identity as an ongoing negotiation and a site of agency. In doing so, her work ensures that these communities occupy not only the photographic frame but also a more enduring place within cultural consciousness.
Read more: Fletcher, G. (2022) ‘Keerthana Kunnath The photographer challenging India’s heteronormativity’, WePresent, 10 October [Link]. | Gasior, Z. (2025) ‘’Not What You Saw’, a photographic series by Keerthana Kunnath’, Thisispaper, 9 October [Link] | Wyatt-Clarke & Jones (n.d.) Keerthana Kunnath [Link].