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00523 1 1 2 735 1 7 Remain (Hooda Afshar) Text Replacement: Remain was made in collaboration with several of the men who still remain on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, six or more years after they left their homelands to seek asylum in Australia, but instead were sent to languish in the remote offshore detention centre. The series involves these men retelling their individual and shared stories through staged images, words, and poetry, and bearing witness to life in the Manus camps: from the death friends and dreams of freedom, to the strange air of beauty, boredom, and violence that surrounds them on the island. 11:14 PM Saad plase note; We will have to italicize the work title in the running text. 11:38 PM 11:40 PM Ami sokale update kore dibo vai 11:49 PM Sounds good 11:49 PM Abhijit Shuvo (3years Professional) Indre, Rena Effendi, ernest cole, pritthi updated in drive + Sheida, AAA 11:52 PM NAME OF ARTIST -- Asia Art Archive (ft. archives of Sheba Chhacchi and Lala Rukh) TITLE OF WORK -- In Our Own Backyard Text (please use in full, you can drop my name from the last line if you want, this is their suggestion. No other edits please.) In Our Own Backyard explores the creative impulses and forms of gathering within the women’s movements in South Asia from the 1980s onward. Organised by Asia Art Archive, the exhibition engages with the personal archives of artists Sheba Chhachhi and Lala Rukh, who played vital roles as organisers and documenters of the movement. The exhibition showcases their archival materials alongside contributions from a diverse community of feminist practitioners and organisations in the region. Sheba Chhachhi (b. 1958) a…Read more Edited11:55 PM South Asian workshop on Women and Development, featuring thirty-eight women feminist participants from across South Asia, photographed by Lala Rukh, Koitta, Bangladesh, 1986. Courtesy of the Estate of Lala Rukh. 11:56 PM Body exercises as part of Kriti: A Workshop on Creative Expression, photographed by Sheba Chhachhi, New Delhi, 1983. Courtesy of the artist.
Body exercises as part of Kriti_ A Workshop on Creative Expression, photographed by Sheba Chhachhi, New Delhi, 1983. Courtesy of the artist.
Pakistan Women’s Day: 10 Years of Women’s Action Forum by Lala Rukh, offset print, 1993. Original dimensions 68 x 45 cm. Courtesy of the Estate of Lala Rukh.
Pakistan Women’s Day_ 10 Years of Women’s Action Forum by Lala Rukh, offset print, 1993. Original dimensions 68 x 45 cm. Courtesy of the Estate of Lala Rukh_
South Asian workshop on Women and Development, featuring thirty-eight women feminist participants from across South Asia, photographed by Lala Rukh, Koitta, Bangladesh, 1986. Courtesy of the Estate of Lala Rukh.
South Asian workshop on Women and Development, featuring thirty-eight women feminist participants from across South Asia, photographed by Lala Rukh, Koitta, Bangladesh, 1986. Courtesy of the Estate of Lala Rukh.

Asia Art Archive (ft. the archives of Sheba Chhachhi and Lala Rukh)

In Our Own Backyard

In Our Own Backyard explores the creative impulses and forms of gathering within the women’s movements in South Asia from the 1980s onward. Organised by Asia Art Archive, the exhibition engages with the personal archives of artists Sheba Chhachhi and Lala Rukh, who played vital roles as organisers and documenters of the movement. The exhibition showcases their archival materials alongside contributions from a diverse community of feminist practitioners and organisations in the region.

Sheba Chhachhi (b. 1958) and Lala Rukh (1948–2017) share a deep commitment to using photography as a means to document, annotate, and construct archives of the women’s movements in South Asia. Both artists were involved in designing and distributing posters and other ephemera, and co-organised and participated in numerous workshops focused on screen printing, theatre, video, and poster-making. Together with feminist activists, writers, filmmakers, dancers, theatre directors, singers, and visual artists, they deliberated on questions of representation of the female subject in art and popular media, proposing new interpretations through creative and discursive interventions.

In this selection, their archives serve as a focal point for exploring the affective registers generated by women’s movements. It captures the diverse sites of gathering that defined this pivotal moment—from small-scale, intimate workshops and seminars to street actions as well as regional and international gatherings. It features ephemeral materials such as posters, booklets, and songs, designed for widespread distribution and public engagement, which transcended urban-rural divides, geographic borders, and traditional notions of authorship. We examine how such ephemeral material challenges conventions of the archive, in their immediacy of address and contexts of circulation, moving at a pace that eludes capture.

In Our Own Backyard was curated by Samira Bose, Özge Ersoy, and Sneha Ragavan for Asia Art Archive, and exhibited at AAA’s library in Hong Kong from 20 Mar – 30 Aug 2025. An excerpt of the exhibition is being presented by Tanvi Mishra for Chobi Mela XI.

Asia Art Archive (AAA) is an independent non-profit organisation in Hong Kong initiated in 2000 in response to the urgent need to document and make accessible the multiple recent histories of art in the region. With one of the most valuable collections of material on art freely available from its website and onsite library, AAA builds tools and communities to collectively expand knowledge through research, residency, educational programmmes, and publications.

About Us

Chobi Mela, the first festival of photography in Asia, is one of the most exciting ventures that Drik and Pathshala has initiated. The first Chobi Mela – International Festival of Photography was held in December 2000 – January 2001. It is the most demographically inclusive photo festival in the world and is held every two years in Dhaka.

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