Does Your House Have Lions (2021) is a 49 minute film by Delhi-based poet vqueeram and Los Angeles based artist Vishal Jugdeo. Shot like cinéma-vérité, the film is excerpted from an informal archive the collaborators have gathered over their decade-long friendship. Intimate glimpses of vqueeram’s community of artists and activists reveal, in the near distance, an intensification of the Indian ethnonationalist state which bears upon characters in uneven ways. As the camera changes hands between the film’s participants, a shifting and prismatic lens intimates layers of closeness and remove from crisis.

One day in the late sixties, I was on the phone with Rahsaan and mentioned to him that just that day I had bought a house. He responded by asking, “Does your house have lions?” I said, “What?” He said, “Lions. You know, like in front of a museum or the post office. You know, concrete lions. My house has lions. Get a house with lions.”

–Joel Dorn, May 1993, Rahsaan Roland Kirk Anthology

Sonia Sanchez’s book of poems for the many sisters who lost their brothers to HIV/AIDS, Does Your House Have Lions?, begins with this excerpt, first published in the liner notes of The Rahsaan Kirk Anthology, which shares this title. Here, Sanchez blurs friendship and family, tosses humor into grief, and troubles history with memory. Titling her book after a found quote—at once a theft and a gift—Sanchez offers a practice of being without property and of naming without debt. A discipline to abolish in the ordinary.

Borrowing our film’s title from Sanchez, we share in the happenstance of words and how we meet each other in living and dying. All the while, we grasp, regard and dream.

Filmed over four years, this video document is an archive of friendship – near, far and displaced; interrupted by sex, politics, and abandonment. These scenes hold unlikely alliances and wayward relations in the middle of fear and hesitant futures. As love manifests its totalitarian tendencies and loss is capacious, we imagine a practice of freedom.

–vqueeram and Vishal
February 26, 2021, Delhi and LA

vqueeram is Assistant Professor at Jindal Global Law School, and a poet and writer. Previously visiting faculty appointments include the School of Culture and Creative Expressions and the Department of Gender Studies at Ambedkar University, Delhi. They have taught courses on intersectionality and abolition at NLSUI, Bengaluru, NUJS, Kolkata and other law schools across India. vqueeram has written about law, sexuality, culture, and abolition in diverse media like essays, editorials, film and poetry in forums such as Frieze, The Wire, MOMA’s journal post, The Shoreline Review, and The White Review. They recently wrote the entry on ‘Gender’ for The Art Institute of Chicago Field Guide to Photography and Media (2022). vqueeram is a postgraduate in political science from University of Delhi. They are currently interested in studying feeling, imagination and the stuff of living beside the law, sex and the tender knots of sociality.

Vishal Jugdeo is a multidisciplinary artist working across video, installation, performance, sculpture and text to experiment with narrative, blurring fiction and truth. Recent screenings and exhibitions have occurred at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CCA Berlin, Cinema Akil, Dubai, and Commonwealth and Council Gallery in LA. Jugdeo is a 2015 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and a 2025 Creative Capital recipient. He teaches at UCLA, where he serves as New Genres Area Head in the Department of Art.