You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.
— Maya Angelou
The participants find shared spaces of resilience in private and public trajectories, anchoring their works in interactions within their communities as well as in moments spent in self-negotiation. The exhibition explores cycles of rupture and regeneration that are influenced by forces of structural inequality, power hegemonies, global conflicts and reflexive inquiries of the self.
As the city, nation and the world at large grapple in the throes of an acutely dark and difficult time, the need to build a vocabulary for hope, coherence and transformation becomes significant. The resilience in the coming together of people to find a safe space for sharing thoughts is crucial. The exhibition attempts to find new ways of re-calibration across disciplines and practices, amidst the fractures and fissures that surround us.
The exhibition begins with a series of photographs, Seeking comfort in a German chair by Bani Abidi, which are inspired by the exercise of bringing together a body and a piece of furniture. At first glance the work may seem like a performative act but serves as a nuanced reflection on the fractured political and social structures of our times. Abidi makes comic unsuccessful attempts at trying to seek comfort in various chairs designed by famous German Bauhaus designers who have been associated in varying degrees with the Nazi regime and in turn, Abidi draws attention to her own position in an increasingly divided society in Berlin where she lives and works.
Two films by Palestinian artist Emily Jacir, made twenty years apart from each other, letter to a friend (2019) and 15 Palestinian Minutes in Palestine (1999), contextualise the continuing genocide, revealing the harsh realities of a life marked by fear, violence, and military oppression.
In the backdrop of Abidi’s photographs, poet Sabika Abbas Naqvi appears on a screen, performing her poems in and around her mohalla in Lucknow as a tribute to the women of the community who give her courage. She grew up amidst these sounds and spaces that instilled in her a sense of community, power, labour, and resistance. Her poems are archives, dreams, and foot soldiers, resisting invisibilities and imagining transformative futures. Reminding one of the power of the spoken word, Naqvi’s formidable words evoke the enduring capacity for collective resistance and become an archive of untold stories and narratives.
Sister Library—a travelling, community-owned feminist library of books, zines, and other publications led by aqui thami, (a Janajati/Indigenous artist from the Himalayas, now based in Mumbai), temporarily occupies a portion of the gallery’s common areas and serves as nodal punctuation within the architecture of the gallery. Clearly defined by an exhilarating pink bookshelf, the library serves as a transformative space that underscores the importance of women’s contributions to the creative world. The library nurtures creativity and encourages dialogue around storytelling and care, challenging societal norms and advocating for alternative forms of expression.
The exhibition presents the path-breaking work of India’s first feminist film collective, the Yugantar Film Collective established in 1980 by Deepa Dhanraj, Abha Baiya, Navroze Contractor, and Meera Rao. Emerging from the working women’s movements in Maharashtra, the collective produced significant impactful documentaries and introduced feminist aesthetics, amplifying diverse voices across demographics, fostering social awareness and responsibility rarely seen in Indian cinema at the time.
Poems by journalist, poet, and activist from the Oraon Adivasi community Jacinta Kerketta punctuate the spaces. Her poem ‘Care’ focuses on themes of motherhood, care, universal wisdom, and the interconnected relationship between land, forests, and indigenous communities. Her poem ‘The national anthem is playing’ sheds light on the contested notion of ‘nationalism’ in our socio-political landscape, where the state suppresses democratic rights with a brutal crackdown on dissent, incarcerating those who oppose it.
Sakshi Gupta presents a body of sculptures, where she directs her gaze at gunny sacks having a pervasive presence in the cityscape, lying abandoned and seeming to embody the sentiments and tribulations of the city and its inhabitants. Observing how these banal objects mutate and take on a form of their own, Gupta reimagines them as a metaphor of our state of entrapment and submission to the mechanisms of life. Gupta will also present a new sculpture, which continues this series and blurs the lines between the animate and inanimate. Simulating a rolled-up carpet, the work fabulates a narrative of an animal perhaps from the wilderness being seduced into a gunny sack and eventually getting ensnared within it, tethered by rope. The organism and its container meld in form, ending up as symbionts of sorts. Gupta’s works seek to confront the viewers with a strong sense of ambiguity, and the challenge of trying to fathom these strange hybrid entities.
The physicality of women’s labour, both inside and outside the domestic domain is expressed in a series of embroidered textiles, Scars of Labor, by Bhasha Chakrabarti, that captures scars on the bodies of two women who work as manual labourers on construction sites. Delicately hand-embroidered onto scrap fabric, the scars are the result of the varied domestic and commercial work that these women perform: a blood blister from falling bricks, a burn from boiling water dropped in the kitchen, a scab from a hot welding rod, a scar from a c-section during childbirth. The scars speak to the way in which both domestic and commercial labour can be simultaneously sites of empowerment and exploitation of the female body.
A synchronised double channel film exhibits Padmini Chettur’s A Slightly Curving Place – A Study, where a transplanted archeological site in Anupu is both the subject and object. Within it, a single body lost in scale to the vast landscape or filling the frame to propose itself. The film is thinking about perspective: the image of a dancer's body moving in a space and the movement of a dancer's body making an image, in conversation. It is a study of how to frame space, how to bring different temporalities - ancient and contemporary - onto the same plane, how to evoke history without narrating it. The lines, textures and colours of the site propose a language of almost 'drawn' movement. A density of physicality that allows the stillness of the space to remain undisturbed, yet palpably alive. A friction between site and body that translates into a presence. The images are heard through a score that asks us to listen to the texture of a potentially unravelling time and timelessness - a slightly curving place.
Fluidity in form and a sonic experience fills the large adjoining space, as the haunting voice of singer, songwriter and sound archivist Moushumi Bhowmik occupies the entire gallery where Ayesha Sultana’s Breath Count works not only act as markers of time through repetitive mark-making but also highlight the precious life-forming act of breathing. The edges of the floor find crevices through which water-like fluid forms in aluminium by Sultana emerge, as if unbound and malleable, flowing through boundaries, leaking through cracks and sealed spaces, and much like the air it rises despite everything. Bhowmik’s song, “Swapno Dekhbo Bole”, recorded specially for the show in response to Sultana’s works invokes a sense of resistance, of questioning and of self-reflection and reverberates in the space. In a world engulfed by constant divisive forces, Bhowmik’s song extolls the viewer to find solace in faith and hope while working towards a future that is rooted in resilience, empathy, and collective healing.
Like Air, I’ll Rise, becomes a space of activation and contemplation. Moushumi Bhowmik’s sound archives, field recordings of songs, sounds and stories titled Her Voices form a collective soundscape in a separate room. Bhowmik mentions, “In this audio essay, I journey across a vast, fragmented and entangled land with named, nameless and unnameable women, listening to their voices, joining in with them. I keep record of our encounters and utterances. We travel from the archives into the future, crossing countless borders; we are both broken and strong, within and without. From the debris of life, from our everyday lives, the song rises.”
Additionally as part of the exhibition, Samuho Collective performs the powerful Bhasaili Re. The solo act along with live musicians is a feminist retelling of the popular legend of Behula—the much-celebrated epitome of the ideal wife from the mediaeval Bengali saga Manasa Mangal Kabya—to delve into issues surrounding women’s agency concerning their bodies, lives, and choices in society.
