TRANSPORTRAITS: Women and Mobility in the City - a chance to submit

TRANSPORTRAITS: Women and Mobility in the City

An exhibition by JAGORI. Curated by Gauri Gill

How do you experience your city? Do you wonder if your experience varies from the men you know? Have you ever decided not to take a bus for fear of sexual harassment? Felt scared walking down a dimly lit street, or driving home late at night? Has any of this impacted your ability to work, study, live and move around freely in your city?

Women’s lack of safety in cities is a serious obstacle to achieving gender equality as it curtails their mobility and limits their right to participate fully and freely as citizens. Among the various obstacles affecting women’s rights is the inability to access the city due to badly planned and unsafe roads and transportation systems. These physical factors are further highlighted by male dominated public spaces and ideologies that prevent women from freely accessing different parts of the city.

JAGORI presents ‘Transportraits – Women and Mobility in the City’, an exhibition that aims to delve deeper into this issue, and understand women’s actual experiences of navigating a city. It hopes to include a range of voices; working class women living on the periphery of the city as well as middle class women commuting to work in the heart of the city. The exhibit hopes to include also the voices of the more vulnerable, such as girls, elderly women, disabled women, indigenous women, lesbian and transsexual women, and those from ethnic and cultural minorities. Professional photographers and artists will engage with the issue, alongside laypeople, and collectives such as Blank Noise and Lucida.

We invite you to share your experience as a woman (or thinking about a woman’s perspective if you are a man) in whatever form you are most comfortable with – photographs (even those taken on a cell-phone camera qualify), slogans, collages, illustrations, posters, cartoons or any other kind of scanned artwork that you like.

Selected works will be displayed at the India Habitat Centre during the Third International Conference1 on Women’s Safety: Building Inclusive Cities which will take place on November 22–24, 2010 in Delhi, India organised by JAGORI and Women in Cities International. The theme of ‘Building Inclusive Cities’ aims to highlight the strategic role of diverse urban actors in creating cities that are more accessible and inclusive to all people, especially vulnerable groups. We plan to make the exhibition a travelling one that will visit schools and colleges in Delhi and other Indian cities to enable a larger public discourse around the issue.

Submission guidelines:

1. Images/Artworks must be submitted in digital format in highest possible resolution: transportraits@lucida.in or prints marked ‘For Gauri Gill-Transportraits: Women and Mobility in the City’ must be sent to JAGORI, B-114, Shivalik, Malviya Nagar, New Delhi 110 017, India, +91 11 2669 1219.
2. Please include the following information with each image/artwork: Your Name, Date of Birth, Title (if any), Place, Year.
3. Please include contact information (phone, email, postal address), if applicable, for our records.
4. All submissions are due by October 1st, 2010.
5. Entries may be modified in terms of size for display purposes. No modification or alteration of content will be undertaken.
6. Photographs/slogans/artwork submitted to the exhibition may be used for non-commercial, educational purposes, or in promotional material for the exhibit.
7. Submitted Entries will not be returned.

About JAGORI

JAGORI (meaning “awaken women”) founded in 1984 is a feminist documentation, training, communication and resource centre. Its main objective is consciousness raising, awareness generation and production of creative advocacy material on women’s rights. JAGORI has sought to address violence against women (VAW) through direct interventions, campaigns and institutional and legal changes. The Safe Delhi Campaign launched in 2004 has been aimed at challenging the gender exclusions and violence that women (especially poor women) face in the city.

About the Curator:

Gauri Gill is a Delhi based photographer. Her work includes series such as ‘Notes from the Desert’, about life among nomadic and rural communities in Western Rajasthan, and ‘The Americans’, a diaristic account of Indian Immigrants in the United States. Her projects engage with questions of identity and becoming, community and the individual self. Gill is a co-editor of Camerawork Delhi, a newsletter about independent photography.

The Third International Conference on Women’s Safety is being organized as a collaboration between JAGORI and Women in Cities International (Canada) along with a number of key international partners including UN-Habitat, the Huairou Commission and UNIFEM. The first and second international conferences were held in Montreal and Bogota respectively.

We welcome all contributions! Please forward widely.

www.lucida.in

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transportraits_english_poster.pdf	164.66 KB
transportraits_suruchi_dumpawar.jpg	2.92 MB

Posted by Anna Fox on July 15^th 2010