Language, Law and
Queer Belonging: Talk

Prior to coming to the UK in 2012, Singh was a non-English speaker and had an unusual relationship with the English language, where words got altered and they adopted new meanings. He often uses his 'pre-English language' gay life to question the legitimacy of certain forms of queer histories in India and the UK.

Previously an AIDS worker in India, he retrained as an artist, leading to a research interest in queer theory that comes from a place of the void of subaltern representations and the desire to agitate that void and foregrounds the significance of storytelling as a knowledge system.


Singh holds a master's in fine art from the University of Creative Arts, Farnham and a PhD from the Royal College of Art. His work has been exhibited at The Art House, Wakefield; The Photographers’ Gallery, FotoFest, Houston amongst others. His writing has appeared in Photo South Asia, TAP Review and On Curating. Singh has been commissioned by Visual Aids (New York), The Art House, Wakefield and Fierce, Birmingham. He lives and works between London and Delhi.

Her recent writing addresses politics, print cultures and poetics of LGBTQ, anti-colonial, feminist and Mad liberation movements in North America and Europe from the early 1970s onwards. She works broadly on sexuality and gender, critical theory and Marxism, contemporary poetry, poetics, and aesthetics, through creative and critical methods.

Nat is the co-author of Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (with Mijke van der Drift, 2024), and co-edited 'Imagining Queer Europe then and now', Third Text special issue (2021). She is the author of four books of poetry, including apparitions (nines) (2024) and of sirens, body & faultlines (2018). Her critical writing has appeared in Social Text, South Atlantic Quarterly, The Funambulist, TSQ and more.