Boodle Fight
The boodle fight is a Filipino military tradition rooted in the precolonial practice of kamayan, a feast consisting of a wide variety of foods, piled high on banana leaves, and consumed collectively with one’s hands. The tradition, itself, is symbolic of the colonization of the archipelago and its peoples, and yet its rootedness in togetherness and abundance remains unchanged.
Indianapolis-based artists Nasreen Khan and Bryn Jackson have collaboratively created this body of work, inspired by four images relevant to Filipino history – The Painted Prince, The Last Supper, The Igorot Sequence, and a Reclining Imelda Marcos – to address the impact of centuries of political and spiritual subjugation on Filipino peoples throughout the diaspora. Using kink as a demonstration of consensual power exchange, the artists’ aim is to reclaim agency in self-representation, to denounce the ongoing exploitation of the Filipino body, and to embrace the contradictions, multiplicities, and intersections of mixed, diasporic existence.
Sets designed by Danielle Joy Graves.
Photography by Rachel Schwebach.
Boodle Fight is made possible with a grant from the Indianapolis Creative Risk Fund, awarded by Central Indiana Community Foundation and funded by the Herbert Simon Family Foundation.