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.
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 Our Own Backyard takes its title from a manual written and designed by Lala Rukh, produced during one such workshop on screen printing in Lahore in 1987. This workshop, along with others held across South Asia from the 1980s onward, provided a platform for artists to share their knowledge with participants from the region.
In this selection, the artists’ archives serve as a focal point for exploring the affective registers generated by women’s movements. They capture the diverse sites of gathering that defined this pivotal moment—from small-scale, intimate workshops and seminars to street actions as well as regional 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.
Disclaimer: This iteration is an excerpt from the exhibition In Our Own Backyard that was curated by Samira Bose, Özge Ersoy, and Sneha Ragavan for Asia Art Archive, and exhibited at AAA’s library in Hong Kong (2025).
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.
Sheba Chhachhi
Sheba Chhachhi (b. 1958) is a photographer and installation artist based in New Delhi. Her lens-based works investigate gender, cultural memory, and eco-philosophy through intimate, sensorial encounters. A long term chronicler of the women’s movement in India, Chhachhi co-created staged photographs of feminist activists in the 1990s and eventually turned to large multimedia installations. Her works retrieve marginal worlds: of women, mendicants, and forgotten forms of labour, interweaving the mythic and the social. Her works are held in major public collections including MoMA, Tate Modern, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi. She was awarded the Jurors’ Choice Award for contemporary art in Asia by the Singapore Art Museum in 2011 and the Prix Thun for Art and Ethics in 2017.
Lala Rukh
Lala Rukh (1948–2017) was an artist, educator, and women’s rights activist based in Lahore. Lala Rukh taught at Punjab University’s Department of Fine Art and the National College of Arts for almost forty years, where she established the MA (Hons) Visual Art Programme in 2000. She was one of the founding members of the Women’s Action Forum (WAF), and worked for Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), Joint Action Committee (JAC), and other platforms advocating for human rights and especially women’s rights until the end of her life. Her work has been exhibited at Dhaka Art Summit (2018), documenta 14 (2017), Drawing Room, London (2017–18), Yinchuan Biennale (2016), and Sharjah Biennial 12 (2015).
