Artists: Anju Dodiya, Arpita Singh, Ashfika Rahman, Gurminder Sikand, Jai Chuhan, Jasleen Kaur, Leela Mukherjee, Mumtaz Karimjee, Sheba Chhachhi,
In 1976, Marge Piercy’s novel Woman on the Edge of Time imagined Connie Ramos, a poor Mexican-American woman institutionalized against her will and subjected to invasive psychiatric experiments that strip her of autonomy over her own body. Confined to a ward, medicated and observed, Connie is treated less as a patient than as a problem to be managed. Her poverty, her ethnicity, and her anger at the world were all read by the institution as symptoms rather than as reasonable responses to a life lived at the bottom of several overlapping hierarchies. Through psychic contact with a woman from the future named Luciente, Connie glimpses a feminist utopia in which gender roles, motherhood, and patriarchy have been dismantled entirely, a world rebuilt from the ground up around land, labour, and kinship held in common, where children are raised collectively, where no one owns land outright, and where the violence done to Connie’s body would be structurally unthinkable.
This exhibition takes Piercy’s title, and her questions, as its starting point, bringing together eight women artists, five of whom built their careers in India, and four based in the United Kingdom, across a sequence of rooms that moves from the laboratory to the street and back to the land, tracing a path from clinical confinement towards collective testimony, and from there towards land, myth, and inheritance. The exhibition unfolds across installation, painting, drawing, and photography, refusing to settle into a single medium or a single geography, much as Piercy’s novel refuses to settle into a single timeline.
Linsey Young,
Curator
