Empowerment
A Learning Journey
Aline Motta | NATURAL DAUGHTER
About the artwork: How do we talk about the future without reconciling our present with our past? Aline Motta mixes fiction with the reality of slavery, violence, and planetary exploitation to challenge those who reduce people, places, and planet to things, resources, and objects.
Prompt: Since this installation is about different ways of looking at the past, think and create story about a long-ago ancestor you’ve never met. The tools at your disposal: memory, desire, fragments of history and family stories.
Nacional TROVOA | UNTITLED
About the series: Nacional Trovoa is an artists’ collection based in Brazil founded in 2017 with the sole aim to visibilise cis and trans women artists of colour. These videos are meant to remind us that our planet appears differently to different people based on who they are, where they are located, and what their lived experiences are. And sometimes, we need to step out of our bodies and reimagine the world differently.
Prompt: For this exercise, open your cell phone. Select an image at random. Find a person you don’t know in the museum. Ask them to describe your image. Reflect on how somebody else sees your image so differently.
About the artwork: Our worlds are only possible in the languages we narrate it in. Shilpa Gupta’s work explores diversity and multiculturalism, and what is exchanged or broken down in the moments when two cultures or languages come in contact.
Prompt: Find somebody to write a word or a phrase in a language that you do not know, in this white space here. Talk to them about why they chose what they wrote. Offer them a word or a phrase back. Know that you have been invited into someone else’s words and worlds.
About the artwork: Tabita Rezaire’s lightboxes produce a strange feeling of cheekiness and sorrow as she reflects on the grim reality of our collective consciousness in a world where Western notions of amendments and reparation ring hollow.
Prompt: Rezaire says that apology is an empty practice until we include and honour the erased black bodies – that were the infrastructure of building our global empires. What are some forms of invisible human labour that are present in the space you’re currently in, but are erased or made invisible?
About the artwork: Belonging to a planet has meant that we leave generational traces of waste, pollution, and destruction. Tejal Shah’s work is a strong commentary on the Anthropocene – the age of the human imprint – and the ways in which it has shaped our planet, especially under water, where our excesses remain hidden.
Prompt: This work is about alternative ways of engaging with toxic environments. Reflect on where water comes from. We invite you to draw its source and imagine the course it takes to reach you, including what kind of objects it comes across as it makes its way to you.
Yael Bartana | Two Minutes to Midnight
About the artwork: We live in poly-crises, and overwhelmingly, all solutions seem to lead to war and genocide. With different parts of the world at war right now, Yael Bartana’s Two Minutes to Midnight is an inspiring thought experiment that asks if things can be done differently. If faced with real crises, what would you do? Are other kinds of futures possible?
Shana Moulton | Whispering Pines
About the series: Even though we have returned to a ‘normal’, the experience of being stuck in our homes, in our screens, in our bodies, during the COVID19 pandemic lockdowns are still fresh in our minds. What could we do, if we were stuck, unable to move, unwilling to leave the narrow confines of our rooms? Would the world exist if we stopped engaging with it? Shana Moulton’s parodic soap opera, where she plays her alter ego Cynthia, who imagines the world without leaving her home is a farcical and tragic tale of how we are increasingly stuck in our filter bubbles and contained universes.
Pacific Sisters
About the series: A feminist intervention in future making will need the presence and collaboration of multiple kinds of bodies. Future making is often imagined as the responsibility and entitlement of the few. With Te Pu O Te Wheke, we see Pacific bodies disrupting our ideas of who makes our futures, and what gender, sexuality, bodies, clothes, and expressions they embody.
Hyphen-labs
About the artwork: People are mirrors. We see in them what we seek to see in ourselves. In this augmented reality that shapes and presents the black female body through shapes, rituals, traditions, and intimacy, the Augmented Reality installation is a way of reconfiguring our bodies and how they appear to us.
Mithu Sen | Untitled
About the artwork: We would all like to believe that we are caring, resisting, and pushing back against the excesses of capitalism and extraction. Mithu Sen’s work prods us, with humour and some tough love, as she points out that there is no escape from the circuits of capitalism. Every political position we take, eventually gets commodified and capitalized upon. Women’s marches produce ‘pussy hat’ merchandise. Grounded movements create viral sensations on Instagram. Our resistance to platforms become posts on the platforms that we create.
About the artwork: We live in poly-crises, and overwhelmingly, all solutions seem to lead to war and genocide. With different parts of the world at war right now, Yael Bartana’s Two Minutes to Midnight is an inspiring thought experiment that asks if things can be done differently. If faced with real crises, what would you do? Are other kinds of futures possible?
Prompt: Put yourself in an ongoing crisis that you are familiar with. If peace and reconciliation was non negotiable, what kinds of decisions would you need to take that would be different from the ones taken? Write a short reflection on how you would build a different future.
About the series: Even though we have returned to a ‘normal’, the experience of being stuck in our homes, in our screens, in our bodies, during the COVID19 pandemic lockdowns are still fresh in our minds. What could we do, if we were stuck, unable to move, unwilling to leave the narrow confines of our rooms? Would the world exist if we stopped engaging with it? Shana Moulton’s parodic soap opera, where she plays her alter ego Cynthia, who imagines the world without leaving her home is a farcical and tragic tale of how we are increasingly stuck in our filter bubbles and contained universes.
Prompt: Open your phone settings to find out how much you have used the phone this week. Reflect on whether you were aware that you use the phone so extensively. Talk with somebody around you, about what happens if our phone becomes the way we see the world and ourselves.
About the series: A feminist intervention in future making will need the presence and collaboration of multiple kinds of bodies. Future making is often imagined as the responsibility and entitlement of the few. With Te Pu O Te Wheke, we see Pacific bodies disrupting our ideas of who makes our futures, and what gender, sexuality, bodies, clothes, and expressions they embody.
Prompt: Imagine yourself as a maker of futures. Put your cell phone on a stand here on one end of this walkway. Open your camera and press video. Invite somebody to walk towards your phone. See them intently. Now go to the other side of the walkway and try to walk like the person you recorded. Come together and see the video, and see how the presence of somebody changes the way we are.
About the artwork: People are mirrors. We see in them what we seek to see in ourselves. In this augmented reality that shapes and presents the black female body through shapes, rituals, traditions, and intimacy, the Augmented Reality installation is a way of reconfiguring our bodies and how they appear to us.
Prompt: In this space, you are invited to narrate a ritual that you think defines you – something that you think is fiercely personal and shapes the ways in which you understand who you are. You can write or draw or illustrate as you please.
About the artwork: We would all like to believe that we are caring, resisting, and pushing back against the excesses of capitalism and extraction. Mithu Sen’s work prods us, with humour and some tough love, as she points out that there is no escape from the circuits of capitalism. Every political position we take, eventually gets commodified and capitalized upon. Women’s marches produce ‘pussy hat’ merchandise. Grounded movements create viral sensations on Instagram. Our resistance to platforms become posts on the platforms that we create.
Prompt: Think of a recent hashtag that you have participated in to perform an act of resistance. Search for that hashtag and see what kind of merchandise and capitalist objects are structured around it. Make a list of these objects and look at how our resistance is generally co-opted by the status quo. Think about what radical new forms will be needed to actually overthrow these systems of domination and oppression.
Lastesis | Un Violador En Tu Camino
About the artwork: Who hasn’t seen the viral video of Chilean women on the streets performing “The Rapist Is You”? But we may not be aware of its origins. In Chile, feminist activism has always been linked to visual urban culture. When the country saw a wave of urban rebellion in 2019, an art collective LASTESIS came up with Un violador en tu camino (A Rapist on Your Way), in response to the police rapes during violent repression of the rebellion. It has since been performed in fifty-two countries and has become universally recognised as a performance of protest against corrupt justice systems and a complicit state, and is highly adaptable in diverse contexts.
Ebtisam Abdulaziz | See Something Say Something
About the series: Resistance can often look like reappropriation and subversion. Here, Ebtisam Abdulaziz spins racist rhetoric on its head! In her 2018 photographic performance “See something; say something” she borrows this phrase from US authorities, who encouraged citizens to report “suspicious-looking” behaviour or persons, thus creating paranoia and fear against certain minority groups, Ebtisam creates a series of photographic self-portraits (Mugshots) in which she plays the role of the suspicious-looking person in question. In her own words, “I will take a self-portrait dressed in a niqab, a hijab, a Sikh turban, Hoody and other items that many Americans may identify as “suspicious.
Goldendean | "This is a lament and is to be used as a lament."
About the artwork: The avatar of Goldendean – molded from clay earth, much like a golem – performs a dirge. Summoned by hubris, they embody collectives of grief and trauma in the (social) body through intersections of history, memory, and resistance.
Lerato Shadi | Mmitlwa
About the artwork: Mmitlwa in South Africa’s indigenous language means extracting one’s own self from a thorny situation. In Lerato Shadi’s work, the word acquires new meaning as viewers see her spend half an hour wrapping and then un-cocooning herself from the white adhesive tape enveloping her body. This is a powerful parable for self-determination and for taking responsibility for one’s own life.
Newsha Tavakolian | Untitled
About the artwork: The image of a woman standing in the middle of the road in boxing gloves is a powerful one. Newsha Tavakolian’s photograph from the Listen project is part of an interpretive series of portraits that aims to highlight the cultural restrictions on female singers in Iran. In the photographer’s own words, “For me a woman’s voice represents a power that if you silence it, imbalances society, and makes everything deform. The project Listen echoes the voices of these silenced women. I let Iranian women singers perform through my camera while the world has never heard them.”
Pussy Riot | Punk Prayer
About the artwork: Equal parts performance-art troupe, punk-rock band, and activist collective, Pussy Riot formed in 2011 Moscow, and were predominantly critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s imperialist policies. Their early work involved a series of high-profile guerilla performances including “Punk Prayer” staged at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Through this action, the group aimed to protest the Russian Orthodox Church’s support for Putin during his election campaign.
About the artwork: Who hasn’t seen the viral video of Chilean women on the streets performing “The Rapist Is You”? But we may not be aware of its origins. In Chile, feminist activism has always been linked to visual urban culture. When the country saw a wave of urban rebellion in 2019, an art collective LASTESIS came up with Un violador en tu camino (A Rapist on Your Way), in response to the police rapes during violent repression of the rebellion. It has since been performed in fifty-two countries and has become universally recognised as a performance of protest against corrupt justice systems and a complicit state, and is highly adaptable in diverse contexts.
Prompt: Let’s try making a protest slogan using a phrase or a word from this anthem, that speaks the most to you, that feels powerful as it rolls off your tongue! Feel free to translate it into a language of your choice.
About the series: Resistance can often look like reappropriation and subversion. Here, Ebtisam Abdulaziz spins racist rhetoric on its head! In her 2018 photographic performance “See something; say something” she borrows this phrase from US authorities, who encouraged citizens to report “suspicious-looking” behaviour or persons, thus creating paranoia and fear against certain minority groups, Ebtisam creates a series of photographic self-portraits (Mugshots) in which she plays the role of the suspicious-looking person in question. In her own words, “I will take a self-portrait dressed in a niqab, a hijab, a Sikh turban, Hoody and other items that many Americans may identify as “suspicious.
Prompt: Have you ever been stereotyped for something you wear, do, your hobbies or where you live? Share some of these external markers (clothes, surnames, address, occupation etc.) in the space below.
About the artwork: The avatar of Goldendean – molded from clay earth, much like a golem – performs a dirge. Summoned by hubris, they embody collectives of grief and trauma in the (social) body through intersections of history, memory, and resistance.
Prompt: Think about the political nature and the myriad functions of lament. Make a sticker around one/some/all of these functions. Think about the functions that are most effective in your opinion, or write about which function resonates the most with you. Rewatch the performance now from this lens.
About the artwork: Mmitlwa in South Africa’s indigenous language means extracting one’s own self from a thorny situation. In Lerato Shadi’s work, the word acquires new meaning as viewers see her spend half an hour wrapping and then un-cocooning herself from the white adhesive tape enveloping her body. This is a powerful parable for self-determination and for taking responsibility for one’s own life.
Prompt: Before you watch the video, take a moment to close your eyes and visualise a body.
- Is the body naked or clothed?
- Does it fit into a clean binary of male or female? How do you know?
- Is it young or old?
- What shape does it take?
- How do you think about your own relationship with the body?
- Is the body naked or clothed?
- Does it fit into a clean binary of male or female? How do you know?
- Is it young or old?
- What shape does it take?
- How do you think about your own relationship with the body?
About the artwork: The image of a woman standing in the middle of the road in boxing gloves is a powerful one. Newsha Tavakolian’s photograph from the Listen project is part of an interpretive series of portraits that aims to highlight the cultural restrictions on female singers in Iran. In the photographer’s own words, “For me a woman’s voice represents a power that if you silence it, imbalances society, and makes everything deform. The project Listen echoes the voices of these silenced women. I let Iranian women singers perform through my camera while the world has never heard them.”
Prompt:
- Write one word that comes to mind when you see the image
- #WhyLoiter is an India-based campaign encouraging women to reclaim public spaces.
➔ Share one space where you are unable to but would love to loiter in freely.
➔ Name a space where you are able to loiter in freely (it could even be a virtual space!)
- Write one word that comes to mind when you see the image
- #WhyLoiter is an India-based campaign encouraging women to reclaim public spaces.
➔ Share one space where you are unable to but would love to loiter in freely.
➔ Name a space where you are able to loiter in freely (it could even be a virtual space!)
About the artwork: Equal parts performance-art troupe, punk-rock band, and activist collective, Pussy Riot formed in 2011 Moscow, and were predominantly critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s imperialist policies. Their early work involved a series of high-profile guerilla performances including “Punk Prayer” staged at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Through this action, the group aimed to protest the Russian Orthodox Church’s support for Putin during his election campaign.
Prompt: Think of the profane things and abuses you have ever heard about your gender, sexuality, positionality, or body. Reclaim those words – give us your best profane poetry!
Boryana Rossa | MADONNA OF THE EXTERNAL SILICONE BREAST
About the series: This is a powerful photographic performance centered around making new meaning out of bodily “imperfections.” Boryana Rossa, a breast cancer survivor, presents a whole new idea of the bra, as an object that presented – to a post-surgery Rossa – exciting new “opportunities to occupy the empty place with different fantastical things”. So she went ahead and made a transparent silicon bra that magnified her surgical scars.
Gabrielle Goliath | ROULETTE
About the artwork: Goliath creates an immersive audio experience, taking the abstraction of gender crime statistics in South Africa, and transforming it into an “embodied, implicating” experience that can jolt one out of apathy and silence. One of the biggest challenges of countering domestic abuse is the culture of silence around it.
Wait for it. There is a chance you might hear it. Or you may only hear static. But even when you think you hear nothing, you will be hearing the sound of silence that surrounds the death and abuse of women in their homes.
Regina José Galindo | PRESENCIA
About the series: This photographic performance at once spotlights the epidemic of violence against women in Guatemala and also seeks to rehumanise thirteen women whose murders were documented widely in the media. Gender-based violence often becomes statistics of harm, hurt, and death. But those who die are more than just numbers. Galindo reminds us that nobody is ever dead as long as we remember their names, their life’s work, their struggles, their joys. We need to remember and share their stories in the hope that it doesn’t happen again.
About the series: This is a powerful photographic performance centered around making new meaning out of bodily “imperfections.” Boryana Rossa, a breast cancer survivor, presents a whole new idea of the bra, as an object that presented – to a post-surgery Rossa – exciting new “opportunities to occupy the empty place with different fantastical things”. So she went ahead and made a transparent silicon bra that magnified her surgical scars.
Prompt: We are not born with our bodies, we make them to fit other people’s ideas of desire and beauty. We hide and shape disabilities, marks, flaws, signs of age, shape, and nature of our bodies as a performance to others. We invite you to draw your body – not as how other people see it, but as you see it; in all its imperfections and desires.
About the artwork: Goliath creates an immersive audio experience, taking the abstraction of gender crime statistics in South Africa, and transforming it into an “embodied, implicating” experience that can jolt one out of apathy and silence. One of the biggest challenges of countering domestic abuse is the culture of silence around it.
Wait for it. There is a chance you might hear it. Or you may only hear static. But even when you think you hear nothing, you will be hearing the sound of silence that surrounds the death and abuse of women in their homes.
Prompt: In the blank space here, write a date – the last date when you heard or saw gender-based injustice, and remained silent.
About the series: This photographic performance at once spotlights the epidemic of violence against women in Guatemala and also seeks to rehumanise thirteen women whose murders were documented widely in the media. Gender-based violence often becomes statistics of harm, hurt, and death. But those who die are more than just numbers. Galindo reminds us that nobody is ever dead as long as we remember their names, their life’s work, their struggles, their joys. We need to remember and share their stories in the hope that it doesn’t happen again.
Prompt: You are invited to read about the 13 women as the real complex individuals that they were, in the booklet accompanying this display. After that, rewrite the story of one of the women that Galindo embodies in this performance.
Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkacova | Manifesto of Futurist Woman (Let's Conclude)
About the artwork: The performance video recontextualises Valentine De Saint-Point’s Manifesto of Futurist Woman (1912), which was the first manifesto by a woman and was written to counter Filippo Marinetti’s misogynistic project ‘The Founding Manifesto of Futurism’. By having majorettes perform the text in naval sign language (a system that belongs to one of the long-established male occupations), the work cleverly juxtaposes this with the symbol of majorettes who are seen as fulfilling the decorative role ascribed to women in many conservative societies.
Prompt: In her manifesto, Valentine says: “Women are Furies, Amazons, Semiramis, Joans of Arc, Jeanne Hachettes, Judith and Charlotte Cordays, Cleopatras, and Messalinas: combative women who fight more ferociously than males, lovers who arouse, destroyers who break down the weakest and help select through pride or despair…” Think about Valentine’s words above (1912) and this artwork (2008) you have just viewed. What words, images, ideas come to your mind when you think of a futurist woman in 2025?
Mathilde ter Heijne | Woman to Go
About the artwork: This interactive artwork is an ongoing project and a global archive. Each postcard shows the portrait of an unknown woman (1839-1929), while the “message” side of the card has text with the biography of a person, who was born as a woman and influential or extraordinary in her time. Most of these women have been forgotten, both sets of known and unknown women help each other become visible again. The postcards can be taken free of charge, so the public can compile alternative historiography through subjective biographies.
Prompt: Pick a postcard from the ones on display. Now look at the portrait and you will see signs of a life lived. Weave a story of this person, who was she, what did she believe in, what did she love, what did she fight for, what did she dream about? Now read the biography on the flip side. Can you connect these two women in your story?
Mia Yu | Pan Yuliang - A Journey from Silence
About the artwork: In this film essay, art historian Mia Yu traces her personal journey of searching for Pan Yuliang (1895-1977), a pioneer in Chinese modern art.
Prompt: Watch the film and go on a wikipedia research marathon – What did you learn about Pan Yuliang from the film that you notice is missing from her Wikipedia page?
Pushpamala N | Kali (after 1908 Calcutta Art Studio calendar)
About the artwork: Kali is a photographic recreation of an 1908 calendar print that served as covert nationalist propaganda under British rule. The original advertisement subtly depicted the Indian goddess Kali trampling the white-skinned Shiva—a metaphor for the defeat of colonial masters. In this work, Pushpamala N uses photography and performance to explore identity, gender, engaging with historical narratives and questioning traditional representations.
Prompt: Go to Google Images and write ‘Indian women and culture photos’ in the search bar. What kind of photographs are you seeing? Write about them here. What kind of images do you think are missing? Make your notes.
Tracey Rose | Venus Baartman
About the artwork: Tracey Rose, a mixed-race South African woman, plays with notions of personal and national identity in her work. Here, she adopts the role of Saartjie Baartman, the famous Hottentot Venus, who was exhibited – and ridiculed – in Paris and London as a scientific curiosity in the early 19th century. Using herself as her main subject, her work comments on colonialism and racism in western art.
Prompt: We invite you to recreate/reimagine one western artwork you know, from the point of view of race, gender and sexuality. Open it up on your phone. Observe it. What would this recreation and reimagination have? Document it here.
Nilbar Güres | Torn
About the artwork: 'Torn' is about Didem, a friend of Nilbar Güreş' who was continually discriminated against and aggressively pursued being queer. She was brutally dragged into a car in Istanbul, robbed and almost murdered when they slit her throat. The installation consists of Didem’s portraiture in front of a fabric cut by Didem herself, in which she used scissors to cut a large, elongated hole in the shape of the scar on her neck.
Prompt: Pick up a piece of paper, and make a crease/mark on it every time someone has questioned your gender or has forced you to behave a certain way based on your gender. Flip the script and also think of the times you have done that. Think of this paper as the cloth used by the artist to connect with the artwork.
Selma Selman | Viva La Vida
About the artwork: Carpet: In the video performance, Selman presents herself between the past and the future – she props herself against the backdrop of a Bosnian carpet traditionally made by women, and holds a watermelon that she “disembowels” with her fingers, eats the pulp, and drinks the juice in the present time of the performance — offering herself up to the gaze of the viewer who is situated at a future moment in time.
Prompt: Look at each of these elements in the performance: the embroidered carpet, the watermelon, the mechanical movement of her fingers. What is getting passed down to you when you see this particular artwork? What do these elements mean to you? Which do you resonate most strongly with and why?
Zanele Muholi | Brave Beauties, Durban
About the artwork: Muholi’s photographs transcend conventional perceptions of the lesbian and transgender communities in South Africa. It reframes a history of violence and hate against LGBTQ communities to show strong, positive, and self-confident people bravely countering heteronormative constraints.
Prompt: Before looking at the photograph/s, ask yourself: What visuals are triggered when I think of the “brave” and the “beautiful”? Look at the photographs from this lens, and see if it matches up to what you imagined.
Arshi Irshad Ahmadzai | Burqewali
About the artwork: Playing with memory, identity and personal history, this series of photographs features the titular Burqewali obscuring their face. Arshi Irshad Ahmadzai cleverly uses everyday objects (like the knife or the iron) or remnants of a lost past (Onida television embroidered on a cloth), in a bid to document the various nodes of the everyday struggle – for power and agency, against erasure and banality, to exercise leisure and desire – for a South Asian Muslim woman.
Prompt: In Arshi’s work, motifs like the pomegranate, chair, takhti, gardens and heart appear repeatedly, which help connect the tense threads of womanhood, identity, culture, history and power. Spot and trace the various nodes of labour and leisure with everyday objects that would translate that experience for you — with regards to the cultural identity you inhabit.
Irena Jukić Pranjić | Gamer Girl
About the artwork: The programmed possibilities of Gamer Girl presents tragic limitations in this computer game/film. The film addresses the difficulties of a person trying to break out of the immovable normative, heterosexual role and gender attributions and expectations.
Prompt: Tell us about a woman you personally know, who you think has really lived up to the saying: “women can have it all”. Reflect also on the labour of other people like domestic workers, nannies, cooks (also usually women) which go into the making of this superhero!
Kawita Vatanajyankur | The Scale of Injustice
About the artwork: In this performance video, Vatanajyankur uses her body to interrogate and challenge the intersections of womanhood, labour and consumerism. She is at once the body and the machine, and her self-objectifying performance attests to human capability and female resilience (in this case, women garment workers in Thailand), even in the face of impossibility or perfect equilibrium.
Prompt: Back breaking labour for women is rarely represented – be in women in construction, industries, medicine, or agriculture, or women performing uncompensated domestic labour and caregiving. What is one representation of such labour in popular culture you came across recently, that depicted this pain, resistance, endurance and resilience?
Wura-Natasha Ogunji | Will I still carry water when I am a dead woman?
About the artwork: The daily task of carrying water, a role traditionally assigned to women in many countries even in South Asia, finds powerful representation in Wura-Natasha Ogunji’s performance, where she hauls cartons of water tied to her ankles, along the busy meandering streets of Lagos, dressed in Afro-futuristic masquerade attire that is traditionally reserved for men.
Prompt: Gender roles of labour and expression, when reversed or subverted, help make a powerful point on what’s accessible and permissible for women, and what’s mandatory for women to conform to. Think of one ritual or a chore that you’ve internalised doing without questioning it - which aligns with your gender role. And then, think of another ritual or chore which you’ve consciously reversed in your immediate context (family, workplace, community etc.)