photoexhibition

City Limits: Engendering the Body in Public Space

Photo-Exhibit
Collaboration Between
Gender & Space Project, Pukar, Mumbai
&
Point Of View, Mumbai

Curators:
Shilpa Phadke & Bishakha Datta

This exhibition explores everyday public spaces in Mumbai through a gendered lens, focusing on the demarcations between public and private spaces, and understand the hierarchies of access that have become part of our taken for granted grammar of viewing the city.

City Limits: Engendering the Body in Public Space is a collaborative endeavour between the Gender & Space project at PUKAR and Point of View. As part of our strategy to develop a fuller understanding of public space in the city, we decided to collaborate with younger non-professional photographers in this experimental show. The effort was to initiate a discussion about taken-for-granted ideas and images about gender, private and public space, respectability, sexuality, body language, streetscapes, citizenship, and representation. This was accomplished through a series of fortnightly workshops which also included examining and commenting on the images that each photographer had assembled.

Our discussions during the workshops took us in varied directions, beyond the original intent to document, focussing in turn on the drawing of and the blurring of boundaries between the public and the private, culminating in four very specific narratives that are unique but nonetheless mirror worlds in the city that are recognisable to many of us. These narratives include profiles of two middle-class women as they engage with the city and two streetscapes that attempt to invert the gaze and offer an alternate way of seeing.

Catalogue essay
The show has been exhibited at:

Mumbai:
The Fourth Floor
Kitab Mahal
05-12 March 20005

Goa:
Goa International Centre
At the Indian Association of Women\’s Studies Conference
03-06 May 2005

New Delhi:
Samrat Hotel
At the International Women and Health Meeting
21-25 September 2005

Frankfurt, Germany:
At the Franfurter Kunstverein
As part of the show: Impossible India curated by Nina Möntmann
27 September – 19 November 2006

• Neelam Ayare
• Abhinandita Mathur
• Roshani Jadhav
• Karan Arora