All for women empowerment

What do designers Kallol Datta and Arjun Saluja have in common with artist Anjolie Ela Menon? All three are part of the Resist Art Show, a travelling exhibition aiming to create awareness of gender inequalities and abuse of women. The exhibition pairs works of art with fashion. It has already gone to Mumbai, New Delhi and Chennai. Artists don’t protest on the streets but take popular culture in the form of fashion, and then subvert it.

In New Delhi, the exhibition also had an element of performance art. When guests walked in, the first thing they saw was a woman walking the tightrope wearing an Anju Modi outfit. In Mumbai, the performance art was a piece called Between the Alter and The Butcher by artist Puneet Kaushik, showing a woman trapped between carcasses of dead animals and an altar. It was meant to illustrate how women in South Asia are treated either as goddesses or as meat, with no space to just be human.

A collaboration between Datta and Saluja featuring a transgender model was the novelty factor of the Mumbai chapter of the exhibition, while singer-actress Monica Dogra played the central figure in Kaushik’s installation.