In our rapidly evolving world today, image has become dominant. Society is saturated with the visual – social media, horrific news cycles, celebrity culture, advertising. Appearance has always been tangled with ideas of worth – namely how much worth certain looking bodies are entitled to. When complicated by gender, class, race, sexuality, and power relations, appearance can give us insight into the structures of survival we’ve been forced into navigating. 

But what do the politics of being actually look like? What consequences do they have, particularly for “womanhood”? Women cannot be denied – but how has this “woman” been created? In a complex region as rich in heritage as South Asia, the idea of “woman” has been historically reductive. Deep-rooted cultures of shame, silence, and stigma, on top of colonial histories, have estranged the relationship between the present moment and female bodied lived experience – she has become “shameless”, “indecent”, “Westernized”, “undesirable”, “too loud”, “hysterical”, and “wrong.” 

‘Whiny Women’ focused on the complexity, contexts, and critiques of these representations of the South Asian female form. The aim is to explore the diversity of representation within the home, workplace, pop culture, arenas of desire, and self-expression, highlighting not just the body, but the processes of how the body is created, viewed, and used. 

It is open to artists of all genders and walks of life, and is not limited to visual arts.