This heartfelt collaboration was destined to be. Ceramic jeweller and sculptor Githan Coopoo and printmaker and painter Shakil Solanki are dear friends and Cape Town confidents who share a deep personal and artistic bond and drive to honour queer desi men in South Africa.

Solanki is a recent Michaelis School of Fine Art graduate whose practice interrogates the dynamics of intimacy, desire and trauma using the idea of a secret garden as his play space. His delicate works are at once dreamy and disquieting and have been exhibited at both WHATIFTHEWORLD and Everard Read galleries. Meanwhile Coopoo is self-taught in clay, his wobbly and outlandish pieces ranging from natural shapes to what appear to be unearthed antiquities. He’s worked with Rich Mnisi and Thebe Magugu and shown at Design Indaba. What brings these two artists’ sensitive aesthetics together is their mutual embrace of the beauty of fragility and importance of their community.

A letter to a friendship

Today I read a letter, written so beautifully from the heart of one friend to another. While it was one written in remembrance of the life of a friendship, of a life that had now passed, it compelled me to celebrate the life of our friendship now priya. I borrow from Mr Gupta’s heartfelt words and sentiment because I see us in what he has written. I hope he will not be mad in my use of unchanged sentences or recounting of events. The reality is that the love he wrote on is our love too.

When we had first met one another Shakil, it was evident that we were gay but of different orientations. You were very shy and reserved about joining the gay scene in Cape Town whereas I was already out and loud. I was determined that you should join me in our liberation, to give a face to queer desi men in South Africa – for our peers and for ourselves. That we were the only two out gay men of Indian origin that we knew was a faux reality I slipped into happily. We became very close as you helped me in my quest to visualise Indian gay men in my work. After four years of schooling in art history I had not been able to find any mention of them and it had become my overarching goal to locate them in the canons of art history, and bring those cannons to life now. You modelled in my first campaign. You were my informant and also my muse and appeared in my earliest pictures at a time when I didn’t want anyone else to.

From then on, our friendship was solidified, perhaps by the odd Bollywood style kiss in the rain, or keeping one another afloat in the drunken night. I came to help you hang your graduate exhibition, watched you finish your degree, winning the class prize for your medium – printmaking. What an excellent printmaker you are priya, the best I know. Your queerness is one of soft bleeding gestures, often painful to witness, as they sprawl out in the secret garden you have created for your love. I admired you greatly for your restraint – a refusal to give everything at once. I still hope you will teach me about this one day.

Birthdays were highlighted by the exchanging of our works with one another – you with prints and paintings, me with jewellery. I am always proud to see you wear my jewellery. You carry it with the grace and sensitivity embodied in the pieces themselves.

We’ve both always been single – neither revelling in it. To be single and gay felt like a burden in this town. We dreamed of a collaboration for a long time, our whole friendship it seems. When the opportunity presented itself, I was so excited – finally. A body of work to speak our shared language of queer platonic intimacy. A body of work that centres South Asian men as the most beautiful in the world. So, you came with etchings, full of signature sprawling men, Hockney and lush orchards or fruit and flowers – each an invocation of your heart. A beautiful series was handed over to me, which I then sought to press and stamp into my clay, forming relief scenes on the surfaces.

Much like a comic book, I collaged various etchings together hoping to form visual stories that could be read in various directions, straying from the linear as we do in this queer existence. I painted with your blues and pinks, marrying them with my pieces’ familiar gold, stringing the final fragments up in a dull suede thong. A collection of over 40 original jewellery pieces were born. Like fragmented relics, we wanted to unearth queer stories that had been lost, that were inside of us both.

We used garments from my wardrobe and yours – salaah tops, shirts and poorly tied dhotis. I made you shave off your moustache – a selfish act. In these images I wanted to meet you again, as if for the first time. You caught a cold after posing in the icy water that winter’s day.

The resulting images are lovely, but they’re not what I’m held by at this time, nor are the pieces. True, it felt powerful to tell fantastical narratives of great weight and importance, on the slightest of surfaces, in such subtle and unassumingly delicate ways. But it is not them that hold me at this time priya: it is your hand in mine and your head on my shoulder, as we make our way home. The ways in which we are brothers who love greater than most lovers do, for we see the world with shared eyes.

This collection and collaboration is not about a material result, but rather, a vetting of love between two friends, siblings who found one another. To celebrate love that does not belong in a heterosexual or homogenous world.

You broke my heart my friend, but I will love you forever.

Githan x