Project setting

Project setting

This Changemakers digital collaboration is a start-up project remotely, using online platforms to create new lines of interest and research, exchanging ideas to create new artwork. We hope this project will be the starting project for a physical exhibition in the future but also open to new collaborators. The pandemic has shown how people have had to adapt creating and working within an online space. For this project, the focus is women/those identifying as women at work. 

The project was initiated in Coventry as part of Coventry City of Culture and the British Council.

Tarla Patel

One of my areas of interest is how women are represented, history has shown how women's art is seen as secondary from men, including the subject matter. Galleries still predominately have images of women from the male gaze. Feminist groups such as Guerrilla Girls, Hackney Flashers, to Pussy Riot have pushed the question of inequalities through the arts, society and politics.

In my own work I have investigated the inter-generational relationship between the women in my family. Looking at what we remember and where we pass on through rituals and tradition. My work explores this relationship predominately through analogue film and photography, the chemical changes and the tangible quality of holding and changing this work to a digital format It is important that I give women the authorship of their own images and voice, this is something that I see within the work of Saba. 

I have wanted to work with Saba from 2020, her work captures and captivates the lives of women around her and those that she observes.  Her observations of women in there everyday lives, through work and rest create an intimate link between viewer and sitter.

Saba Zahid

In todays modern world, woman's role in our society is still overlooked. she is constantly a subject of the gaze, let it be a male or of the same gender, as Jon Berger states,  

"To be born a women has been to be born, within an allotted and confined spaces. Into the keeping of men. The social pressure of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a women’s self being split into two. A women must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a women."

My work focus on the importance of "her" identity, depicting everyday modern scenes of women either working or in their home/ environment, defining the fine line of how the identity of women has been molded over the decades in a society according to the their customs and traditions. My paintings derive inspiration from Edouard Manets everyday modern life scenes, Iqbal Hussain's dancing girls and Amrita Sher-Gils portraits of women. Since the source of my work comes from photography, working with Tarla will help me create images of other women outside my culture/ religion/ country, diminishing boundaries.