A chorus of women’s voices breaks out from an inner room, curtained in red, at a quaint gallery decked with wooden floors and lovingly called Neighbour in Thiruvananthapuram. The voices echo, “red, red, red,” as one woman asks, “What’s the colour I bleed", and "What’s the colour you bleed?” But there is silence when she asks, “Then why am I Pulaya and you are Brahmin? Then why am I impure and you are pure?”
All the voices come from a recorded audio, reading out a poem titled We Are Watching You by writer Aleena as part of an exhibition that began at Neighbour on December 8 and will run for two more months. The exhibition, titled ‘You Cannot Act Upon What You Cannot See’, revolves around the Hema Committee report, released in August, which confirmed the many stories of sexual exploitation within the Malayalam film industry. In one of the rooms, a folded copy of the report is bundled up next to a framed photograph of the letter the Women in Cinema Collective (WCC) wrote to the Chief Minister of Kerala in 2017, requesting the formation of such a committee.
Vali and Joe, the artist couple who founded Neighbour, believed that the report and the conversations it sparked would be the perfect theme to launch their gallery. Joe, who grew up in Thiruvananthapuram, and Vali, from Italy, ended up in the capital during the COVID-19 lockdown and decided to open a creative space that would foster a sense of community. They explain, finishing each other’s sentences: “All the questions related to how violence is perpetrated everywhere, how we represent and accept the violence on our screen,” she says, and he adds, “We realised that we had to channel this sense of helplessness we felt [about violence everywhere] to somewhere within our proximity.”
That was when the Hema Committee report was released—what Vali calls the starting point of many conversations around abuse. While the report and the WCC feature prominently, a central theme of the exhibition winds around PK Rosy, the first heroine of Malayalam cinema, who was chased away for playing a privileged caste Nair woman while being a Dalit. Aleena’s poem is an extension of the theme, leading from an exhibit containing 56 photos of Rosy—the same single photo of hers, repeated over and over again, “to resist her erasure.”
“For us as photographers, looking back at the one surviving image of Rosy was very interesting,” says Joe, referring to the picture discovered in the 1970s by Kunnukuzhi S Mani, who later wrote a book about Rosy. Vali explains how the image became iconic, representing a strong symbol of what Rosy stood for. “For us, it was tricky. We had to give more than just the sentence that she was the first actress in Malayalam cinema. She is so much more in terms of gender, representation, and caste. She was an actor, singer, and dancer before that, we realised when we spoke to local historians.”
In the room with the Rosy Wall (how they named the exhibit of her photos) is also a little book of coloured papers called Study of an Artist, prepared by artist Meera. In pictures and prettily jotted lines, she traces the life of Rosy, who was also known as Rajamma or Rajammal. Rosy was a known performance artist before JC Daniel cast her in Vigathakumaran, the first Malayalam film.
Incidentally, Rosy and Vigathakumaran are also the themes of the signature film of the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), happening in parallel in Thiruvananthapuram. In one of many acts of serendipity that brought the exhibition together, Bina Paul, who had coordinated the IFFK for 27 years, inaugurated the exhibition. Bina is a renowned film editor and one of the key members of the WCC.
The first person Vali and Joe contacted when they wanted to involve the WCC—instrumental in bringing out the Hema Committee report—was Bina Paul. Hers is one of the faces that often appear before the media for the collective, which was formed in the aftermath of a brutal sexual assault of a woman actor in February 2017. Bina’s voice and work, along with those of other WCC members such as filmmakers Asha Achy Joseph, Anjali Menon, and cinematographer Fowzia Fathima, are hung on the walls of the gallery. “They are part of the research work of filmmaker Miriam Chandy Menacherry, who has been documenting long-form interviews of WCC members,” says Joe.
Even their presence on the sets, working in fields not traditionally marked for women, becomes a statement. On one wall, you see paintings of 30 more women engaged in jobs stereotyped as men’s jobs—the work of artist Sreeja Pallam.
“All these women are real women she met. Many of them took up these jobs not tailored for them because of the need to support the family,” Vali says, linking financial independence to aspects of gender disparity and bias. She explains how the same biases seen in society are mirrored in cinema, a conversation that goes back and forth when one medium becomes a representation of the other.
This idea clearly manifests in Anjana’s exhibit Oru Chayakkada Scene (A Tea Shop Scene), which is perhaps the most alluring image in the gallery.
At the centre of the exhibit is a simple but very telling image of a group of women in a tea shop—workers relaxing with a cup of tea, sharing a laugh. It becomes remarkable only because of the rarity of such a picture—something as simple as taking a break from work to sit around a table at the local tea shop is, sadly, still too rare for working-class women. Like petals growing out of the image are scores of snapshots of ‘chayakkada’ scenes from Malayalam films through the ages, every single one showing only men in action. Anjana had worked on the central image as part of her project at the National Institute of Design; the snapshots of men’s pictures, surrounding it, were added as part of the exhibition.
In a small video of their interaction, made for the project, the women appear overjoyed by this simple act of pleasure. One of the women is Anjana’s mother, Ajitha. Among the others is one who had never been to the cinema after her marriage decades ago, and another who found it so difficult to enjoy herself, so unused was she to the idea of entertainment.
Vali extends these thoughts to the topic of abuse, saying how many women do not realise that there is an alternative—not only for jobs but for the life they lead. They do not know, she says, that they can leave an abuser and that this is not how they should be treated. She put out a video installation in collaboration with others, jotting down cliché lines that women often hear from an abuser: “Look what you made me do,” “I didn't want to hit you; you made me do it.” Anjana, Meera, and Vali laughed together when they realised they’d all heard variations of these same lines, until they realised it was not funny; it was scary how the workings of abuse could be so universal.
Flickering across a screen in the midst of it all are the two words: “adjustment” and “compromise.” These words repeat throughout the statements of women in the Hema Committee report—when they were asked to ‘compromise’ or ‘adjust’ in exchange for an opportunity to work. They are words also familiar to women around the world, entering new relationships, making commitments—words that are never about the peace they promise but the depths you are willing to lower yourself into.
The exhibition will end on February 8.