As a student at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, 7.30 pm was my favourite time of day. That was when representatives of campus groups and competing student political parties visited hostel dining halls to share updates on campus issues. As they strode in, they’d glue cheaply printed flyers, or parchas in Hindi, to a notice board, disseminating their take on an issue. The parchas combined simple illustrations or symbols – a balled-up fist raised in protest, a flaming torch – with packed text going all the way to the margins of the page. Glued to already-full walls and boards, the thin flyers coalesced into a weighty mass – their layers of seethrough text eliciting a history of student action.

Similarly, ‘temporary’ materials underpin In Our Own Backyard at the Asia Art Archive (AAA) in Hong Kong, on view until August 30, which begins to examine the women’s movement in South Asia, driven by a range of activists, organisations and communities, through the archives of artists Sheba Chhachhi and Lala Rukh. AAA documents recent art history in Asia, with resources available on its website and on-site library in Hong Kong; it also has independent hubs in New Delhi and New York. The exhibition is curated by AAA team members based in New Delhi and Hong Kong - Samira Bose, Özge Ersoy and Sneha Ragavan, with support from Noopur Desai, Paul C. Fermin, Christopher K. Ho, Jocelin Kee, Christy Li, Rebecca Tso and Lily Wong. Displayed on stray tables, bookshelves and windowsills in AAA’s library, the exhibition encompasses photographs, books, posters, text excerpts and audio recordings. It also includes a response to the archival materials, in the form of an online radio station set up by the Asian Feminist Studio for Art and Research (AFSAR), titled Moving Hums (2025).

It is significant how In Our Own Backyard reads Chhachhi’s and Lala Rukh’s archives contemporaneously, acknowledging a shared modern and contemporary feminist praxis across India and Pakistan (where they are/ were based), and other countries in South Asia. The artists were simultaneously archivists and participants, shaping the affective afterlife of the movement both in how they contributed to it and how they witnessed it. They documented workshops, street actions and regional meetings, but also performed street theatre, designed impactful posters and started women’s groups.

Feminist solidarities trumped longstanding geopolitical tensions in the region, with women across South Asia recognising the shared tenets of their struggle.

The exhibition, as Ragavan noted in a walkthrough, is a starting point for a longer engagement with materials from the women’s movement. It starts in the 1980s, at a time of growing public and intersectional advocacy by feminist activists, spurred by political developments in the artists’ home countries, like the 1975 declaration of Emergency rule in India, which sought to squash dissent against then ruling Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (adopting forced sterilisation as a population control mechanism, amongst other measures), or Pakistani military leader Zia ul Haq’s 1977 coup and the erosion of women’s rights in his 11 years as President. New women’s rights groups, like the Women’s Action Forum in Lahore (of which Lala Rukh was a founding member) and Saheli in New Delhi, responded to the casual climate of violence against women that the region’s political volatility enabled.

Such violence was orchestrated in domestic and public settings, leading activists to turn to populist modes of dissemination to counter it – including artistic practice. Ephemera from two screen printing workshops in the 1980s includes photo documentation and a technical manual. At Kriti: A Workshop on Creative Expression, led by choreographer and organiser Chandralekha for Saheli in 1983, Chhachhi documents a group of women printing posters for March 8, International Women’s Day. In one photograph, the red and white posters are arranged in double lines in a carpeted room, the wetness of the ink making them pop against the faded carpet. In Our Own Backyard, a 1987 screen printing manual which lends the exhibition its name, is replete with practical tips: “All the exposing work is done in the darkroom.” With design and text by Lala Rukh, the manual offers a quick history of printmaking and step-by-step instructions to print on paper and textile and for mass production. In another room, a pillar with floor-to-ceiling posters by Lala Rukh, Chhachhi and others illustrates the visual vocabularies they wrought around women’s bodies, highlighting their voicelessness but also their collective strength.

Performance was another effective form of public action, mobilised to unpack complex social issues, not only at proscenium venues, but also as street theatre in local hubs and informal settlements. Street theatre was accessible and relatable; it could be used to share knowledge, advocate for better working conditions and grassroots mobilisation. The play Om Swaha (1979) drew on a real-life dowry death in New Delhi’s upscale Jangpura neighbourhood, critiquing an illegal but widely prevalent practice, where brides were expected to make gifts of money, property or assets to the groom’s family at the time of marriage. Conceptualised by theatre makers Maya Rao and Anuradha Kapoor, it was performed by a varied cast of artists, activists and students. The agility of street theatre allowed it to be taken to the groups most affected by the issues it discussed – from women in oppressive patriarchal structures to marginalised social groups and factory workers. Chhachhi’s photographs of Om Swaha document performances at police station sit-ins and low-income neighbourhoods; in an iconic moment from the play, a group of actors are photographed mid-slogan, their raised arms interlinked as they form a defiant circle.

Lala Rukh’s photographs from Pakistan capture a similar urgency, documenting public protests against the collapse of religion and state, leading to a surfeit of repressive legal structures during Zia ul Haq’s rule. In a photograph labelled ‘9th Amendment’, ostensibly of a protest against the proposed imposition of sharia law in Pakistan in 1986, a group of women hold up banners advocating against terrorism and fascism. The image is at once public and intimate; a woman in the centre of the frame tugs at a big banner, looking squarely into the camera, but those around her talk to each other with animated faces and gestures, oblivious to being witnessed. Women at protests risked being beaten, tear-gassed and even arrested, the Women’s Action Forum website elaborates.

The urgency of their own bodies being at stake, threatened by lax legal frameworks and institutional complicity, punctuates Chhachhi’s and Lala Rukh’s dual roles as participants and archivists of the movement. In a text accompanying a presentation of her photographic series Seven Lives and a Dream (1980-91), Chhachhi describes how a group of women’s rights activists infiltrated a Rani Sati procession (glorifying the titular mythological figure and other women who were burnt to death on their husbands' funeral pyres), which she first photographed from the sidelines, later jumping a barricade to join (and disrupt) the march. This blurring of lines carries over to later works with overlaps between feminist activism and ecological causes. In The Yamuna Series (2005), a collection of three animated light boxes, female figures dot water bodies and urban landscapes, gesturing to the ongoing displacement of communities and ecologies through large-scale infrastructural projects. Lala Rukh’s Sigiriya III: Night, the second of three original artworks in the exhibition, merges a body of water with images of the town’s fifth century water gardens, laid out with rectangular precision. Lala Rukh made the work following multiple visits to Sri Lanka for workshops connected to the women’s movement.

Feminist solidarities trumped longstanding geopolitical tensions in the region, with women across South Asia recognising the shared tenets of their struggle. The gatherings that the movement organised and attended – also participating in international forums – sought to build collective resources and knowledge and offered opportunities to unwind. In a 1986 gathering in Bangladesh, three images of women dancing with each other sit alongside scenes from workshops and discussions. A woman in a sari laughs uproariously as she twirls with Lala Rukh. In another image, other women pair up to dance; the staid workshop space with its blackboards in the background suddenly transformed into a ballroom. Almost all the dancing couples are photographed mid-sentence, continuing longer conversations as they hold hands and guide each other across the room. These embodied moments of action and solidarity are as much a legacy of the women’s movement as its impact on legislation or society, as In Our Own Backyard reminds us.

‘In Our Own Backyard' is on view at Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, from March 20 – August 30, 2025.

(The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR.)