Artist-in-Dialogue

Mia Shay Jose is a visual artist and researcher who uses graphic narratives to probe questions of gender, inheritance and embodiment in cultural stories, informed by experiences of transition: of body, culture and profession. Her creative practice approaches social systems both through the lens of a transgender body and that of a legal researcher, searching for a reconciliation of conflicted parts essential to the self. Over the last 2 years, this search has led to Negotiations, a comic travelogue charting the policing of non-binary bodies across public spaces, Regards Your Skin, an anthology around self-policing and motherhood, and a public mural with trans communities in Kerala. She is especially interested in the power of horror and the grotesque to interrogate what lies outside the borders drawn by religion, law and respectability. Her current projects include a comic about caste and queerness in the church, and a graphic adaptation of a Malayalam novel, both rooted in South Indian folklore.

Simon Lamouret is a French comic book author and illustrator. He lived and taught in Bangalore, India from 2013 to 2017, an experience that shaped his graphic novels Bangalore (2017); L’Alcazar (2020); and The Mirror Man (2024), all published by Sarbacane in France and translated into several languages. In 2024 he was a resident at Rachna Books in Gangtok as part of the Villa Swagatam programme, held by the French Institute in India. Sikkim Stories, set to release in France in September and co-authored with Pema Wangchuk Dorjee, is set amid the high-altitude landscapes of Sikkim.