Sex Temples

Sex Temples is a collaboration between garima thakur & Tabitha Nikolai.

Sex Temples is a simulated ceremonial space exploring our early memories of sexuality & gender through the lens of cultural, historical, and personal hybridity. The work draws influence from both the Khujuraho monuments in Madhaya Pradesh (commonly known as Sex Temples) and banal sites of suburban American youth culture. Each digital vignette within the game illustrates a dreamy recollection from our youths, both mundane and traumatic, and the formatively repressive dimensions that lie therein. The narratives told in the architecture of the physical Sex Temples built in 885 AD convey multitudinous forms of gender identity, are more progressive than many contemporary attitudes about gender and sex. Amidst the mounting pervasiveness of digital spaces, a re-imagining of human gender and sexuality occurs, and the ways of living described in the sutras become increasingly prescient. 

This game initially appeared as part of a physical art installation, Remains of Our Refuse, at SOIL gallery in Seattle, Wa. You can view documentation of the full exhibition here.