Mighty Margins

This exhibition attempts to showcase artworks from artists that let us in on these very experiences. These artworks speak to horrors of marginalisation based on gender, caste, disability, and identity, and offer an alternative where the future doesn’t have to be unjust. We bring this exhibition to celebrate the resilience, defiance, solidarity, and tenacity of the marginalised communities.

Social issues addressed through art

Different forms of artistic expression have played a cardinal role in social movements against inequality, oppression, and injustice, all throughout history. These art forms have lent social justice movements much-needed traction, thereby promoting, informing, and shaping social change. Be it the Renaissance movement, Women’s Rights Movement, Black Lives Matter Movement, Queer Art Movement, or even the Swadeshi movement. These artworks not only document the grim realities of systemic oppression but offer scope into the agony of lived experiences. There is beauty in their candid vulnerabilities yet stern defiance against historic systemic oppression that has cost their communities-the right to life, including the right to live with dignity.

Dekho Par Pyaar se

Ajinkya Dekhane, a Mumbai- based architect, artist, and writer

Coming from an Ambedkarite Buddhist background, his practice engages with spatial exploration and expression of caste ghettos in the urban space. He uses mediums of Architectural drawings, sketches, fiction, and non-fiction writing to narrate the stories of his people and expose the rot of caste that lingers in the very foundation of Indian cities.

High Hand

Jose, a genderfluid illustrator from Kerala

Her work aims to bring to life experiences often kept out of the mainstream, mainly around the themes of gender and mental health. Employing surreal imagery and drawing from their fascination with the human body, they consider their work successful if they are able to make the viewers question the perspectives, we all have been conditioned into.

Dalit Lives Matter

Siddhesh, an artist and visual designer

His work primarily addresses narratives around hegemony and discrimination, especially the atrocities faced by the Dalit-Adivasis community. While minimalism and post-modernist thought are the main influence of his work, his work is based on in-depth research on the subject. Siddhesh describes himself as a multi-discipline, mixed-media artist, designer, treasure hunter, fallen angel, and soul searcher, and his work is a personification of his personal spiritual journey.

Mavelinadu

Shrujana Shridhar, a Mumbai-based illustrator and artist

She works on children’s books and editorial illustrations. Her work centers on anti-caste expression from an Ambedkarite and feminist perspective. She belongs to the Ambedkarite-Buddhist community, and runs the Dalit Panther Archive, which focuses on digitising and translating Little Magazines and literature published by the members of the Dalit Panther movement.

Social innovations in the law and justice space have never been a result of a singular event, but a series of events and triggers.

Many movement leaders in the social justice sector have addressed grave social issues through art leading to systemic and mindset shifts. Mighty Margins was conceptualised with the view of ‘Everyone a Changemaker’ movement. Also, keeping in mind that social innovations and social movements are borne and led by a community of artists, activists, lawyers, civil society actors, academics, and the marginalised community itself.

This exhibition was a celebration of this very fact. These pieces collectively drove home the grave compounding nature of intersectional marginalisation on the basis of gender, caste, disability, and history.