In the world of ‘She’: An exhibition that explores the feminine gaze and the idea of becoming

There is a hand that appears repeatedly in the stories women tell. Not always visibly, and not always in paint. Sometimes it is folded into memory. Sometimes it arrives carrying a child, kneading dough, fastening a clasp, sending a text, closing a studio door, or opening one. It is the hand that is engaged in the act of caring so perpetually that it often disappears from view. Yet it remains one of the most enduring symbols of women's lives: a vessel of labour and tenderness.

It is perhaps fitting, then, that She, a new exhibition bringing together seven South Asian women artists, begins not with a declaration but with an act of looking. Women aren’t viewed as subjects, muses or symbols, but looked through them, towards the complex emotional architectures they inhabit. Here, womanhood is not presented as a fixed condition. It is restless, contradictory, expansive. 

Curated through the lens of creative consultant Supriya Dravid, She is less interested in providing answers than in dwelling within the questions that shape contemporary feminine experience. What emerges is not a singular portrait, but a constellation: seven artists, seven practices, seven distinct vocabularies for articulating what it means to move through the world as a woman today.

There is a temptation, whenever an exhibition centres on women, to seek a common thread strong enough to bind every work together. Viewers often arrive searching for a singular statement, a collective position, a neatly articulated feminist thesis. But She resists this impulse from the outset. 

The exhibition is not interested in presenting women as a unified category. Its seven artists—Afina Ashraf, Alishba Binte Faysal, Krisha Bhuva, Jahnvi Singh Rohet, Mahnoor Salman Khan, Mays Al Moosawi, and Pem Lham—span geographies, cultural histories, and artistic vocabularies. Their practices emerge from vastly different contexts, stretching across India, Bhutan, Oman, and the broader South Asian diaspora. Yet rather than flattening these differences into a singular narrative, the exhibition allows them to remain visible. What emerges is not consensus but conversation.

Notably, the exhibition is not structured around geography. It is structured around emotional terrain. What does a woman inherit, and what does she remember? What does she carry, and what must she unlearn? Perhaps the most significant: what forms become available once she allows herself to be seen on her own terms? These questions move quietly through the exhibition like an undercurrent. 

Ashraf turns to the domestic to trace unseen labour and emotional inheritances of women, while Faysal returns to memory, personal and archival, in a dreamlike exploration of how histories shape identity. Bhuva moves between body and nature, where softness becomes resistance, and the feminine is lived rather than depicted. Khan reworks miniature to hold love in its most fragile and enduring states, longing, absence, and return, while Al Moosawi centres the female figure within charged terrains of identity and desire, where vulnerability expands into a collective narrative.

Within this constellation, Rohet moves across painting, text, and installation, drawing from Indian philosophy and mythology to explore selfhood and devotion as both intimate and expansive. Lham brings a vivid, fluid sensibility to belonging, where colour and movement articulate identity in flux. Together, these works resist resolution. They remain open and dynamic. 

The female gaze has become one of the most discussed concepts in contemporary culture, often flattened into aesthetic shorthand. In She, however, the gaze regains its complexity. It is observant and unflinching.

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of She is its attention to the spaces traditionally dismissed as ordinary. Across its many voices, one idea emerges repeatedly: identity is not fixed; it is negotiated daily through relationships, histories, choices, and acts of imagination. 

Details 

She: 7 Women| 7 South Asian Artists| 7 Voices

A group exhibition of Works by seven South Asian women artists 

Location: Gallery Pristine Contemporary, New Delhi 

Preview: Saturday, 23rd May, 2026 On View: 25th May–5 July 2026

Timings: 11:00 AM – 6:00 PM, Monday to Saturday

Photo credits: Artists' work, through Gallery Pristine Contemporary 

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