On February 1, 1974, the Senegalese newspaper Le Soleil published a shocking headline: “Younousse’s Slashed Painting: A Simple Matter of Scissors.” According to the article, Senegalese artist Younousse Seye (b. 1940) discovered that her painting Mame Coumba Bang (n.d.) had been vandalized as she guided Ethiopian visitors around the second Salon des artistes sénégalais at the Musée dynamique de Dakar, Senegal’s national collection. This event had high stakes: Pieces from the salon would be selected to tour internationally as part of the landmark traveling exhibition Arts sénégalais d’aujourd’hui opening in the Grand Palais in Paris. One might imagine, then, the shock, panic, and disappointment Seye must have felt upon seeing the strips of fiber that she had embedded into her painting sliced off and scattered across the floor. 

Apart from three newspaper articles describing the incident, no visual record of the work survives. Nevertheless, reconstructing the imaginative depth of Seye’s Mame Coumba Bang through descriptions of its defacement opens a window into contested struggles within Senegal’s postindependence art world. Specifically, a closer reading of this scandal reveals not only the gendered and racialized structures of the cultural landscape Seye was navigating, but also her insistence on challenging them.

Before displaying her work in the Musée dynamique, Younousse Seye had emerged quickly on the Senegalese arts scene. Born in Saint-Louis in colonial Senegal in 1940, she came of age amid African independence movements, and her career evolved in tandem with this long moment of decolonization. Working across oil, wood, iron, marble, poetry, and cinema, the self-taught Seye expressed Pan-Africanist and feminist sympathies, grounding her oeuvre in woman-centered African aesthetic practices, techniques, and themes. While local artists of her generation share her Pan-African ideals, Seye’s assertive feminism distinguishes her work, periodically generating tensions with her male peers.¹

By the time Mame Coumba Bang was exhibited at the 1974 Salon des artistes sénégalais, Seye was more than a decade into her practice. Her creative sensibilities first developed when she was a child, while she assisted her mother in dyeing batik, working outdoors and observing nature’s color palette.² She began painting in her spare time in the mid-1950s while pursuing secretarial work. The First World Festival of Negro Arts (FESMAN), held in Dakar in April 1966, marked a pivotal moment in Seye’s career. Eager to participate, she volunteered as a hostess and, through her encounters with Black artists and intellectuals from across the world, found the inspiration that led her to fully commit to an artistic path. Within three years of her participation in FESMAN, she shot to fame as both a painter and an actress, starring in Ousmane Sembène’s Mandabi (1968), which won the Special Jury Prize at the 1968 Venice Film Festival. By placing her work in the film’s background, Seye drew further international attention to her developing visual arts career. 

During this period, Seye became renowned for her distinctive use of cowrie shells. Once used as currency in Africa, cowries convey symbolic spiritual and material power. Across the continent, cowries are also associated with fertility, women’s adornment, and feminine power. Seye was among the earliest artists to employ them as a material, threading them onto canvas or embedding them into marble or iron, and she believed that “the language of the spirits is passed down through the secret of cowries.”³ Through her signature use of the shell, Seye merged African spirituality, feminine symbolism, and continental themes of power and ritual in her work, creating a unique expression of Pan-African feminism. Her engagement with Pan-African themes quickly earned her the attention and patronage of President Léopold Sédar Senghor, who helped to propel her career from the early 1970s onward.⁴

Despite her success, Seye stood apart from other professionally exhibiting Senegalese artists in that she did not rise through the ranks of the Dakar School: a network of artists in the postindependence nation who received government patronage in the form of funding, training at national institutions, and participation in state-sponsored salons and exhibitions. It is notable that she never sought this label. Indeed, when Senghor offered her a teaching position at the national art school, she declined it.⁵ In this sense, Seye maintained a critical distance from the state’s cultural apparatus while, at the same time, benefiting from its international reach. 

This was not without its costs. Senghor, too, maintained an ambivalent position toward Seye: Though he extended his patronage, he also voiced reservations about her aesthetic choices. Upon seeing Seye’s solo exhibition at the Théâtre national Sorano Theatre in Dakar in 1977, for example, he derided her characteristic use of organic materials like cowries and vegetable fibers. Senghor disassociated Seye’s use of female-gendered materials—subject to decay over time—from the “eternal” qualities of high art. He elaborated, “This is what gives European artists their practical superiority. We must try to renew the African art of painting for eternity.”⁶

By the mid-1970s, many artists, critics, and intellectuals were expressing their disillusionment with Senghorian cultural policy, decrying its alleged neocolonial cultural visions and institutional structures.⁷ Critics felt their viewpoints affirmed when, in 1974, the minister of culture Alioune Sene appointed 26-year-old Frenchman Georges Hornn as curator of the Musée dynamique.⁸ Hornn had no curatorial experience; his artistic credentials included amateur photography and a film commissioned by the Senegalese government.⁹ He was appointed after arriving in Senegal as a coopérant militaire—a French civil service position that was itself a colonial legacy—two months prior.¹⁰ The defacement of Seye’s Mame Coumba Bang in 1974 under Hornn’s watch just weeks into his tenure crystallized this widening divide between the state and cultural actors, and at the same time, it underscored Seye’s outsider status within the arts establishment. 

The vandalism of Mame Coumba Bang became public knowledge when, following the incident, the dramatist and critic Abdou Anta Kâ, who was Seye’s close friend, published a forceful editorial in Le Soleil. Kâ cast the slashing not as an isolated act, but rather as the result of institutional negligence under white museum leadership hostile to what he called “independent Senegalese painters.” He pointedly cited the Ethiopian delegates who first discovered the damage, noting their disbelief that works could be left unprotected in a state museum equipped with guards and a curator. According to Kâ, Hornn dismissed the incident altogether, claiming it was not “his business” to intervene.¹¹

For Kâ, this indifference exemplified broader tensions within Senghor’s cultural establishment. He framed the attack as symptomatic of a neocolonial cultural policy in which white juries determined which African works merited international circulation. These critics, Kâ argued, claimed authority by evaluating artists according to whether they aligned with their own schools or theories of a “Black African aesthetic,” a posture he likened to that of the cercle commanders of the colonial era.¹² In this reading, Seye’s work was vulnerable not merely because of individual malice, but also because its value was decided through Eurocentric criteria embedded in the attitudes of the museum’s leadership.

State officials swiftly rejected this interpretation. In an interview published days later, Hornn denied responsibility, accusing Kâ and Seye of exploiting the vandalism as a “Trojan horse” for personal grievances. He dismissed the episode as a publicity stunt “underpinned by false anger.”¹³ Alioune Sène went further still, condemning Kâ’s critique as exceeding “the measure of tolerable bad taste.” He trivialized the damage by reducing Seye’s use of yoss—a vegetal fiber traditionally used by Senegalese women for braiding—to a matter of “snipped tresses” and echoed Hornn’s claim that the controversy sought to undermine the jury’s discernment.¹⁴ Both men ultimately defended the authority of the museum and the legitimacy of the white jury as best qualified to represent Senegal on the international stage.

Notably absent from this exchange is Seye’s own voice. In later interviews, she recalled the perpetrator with restraint, describing him simply as someone who resented others’ success, and remarked bluntly of Hornn: “He didn’t like Younousse Seye” (fig. 4).¹⁵ Although Senghor later offered Seye compensation for the damaged painting, she refused it.¹⁶ For her, the incident was never about publicity or restitution, but rather the museum’s failure to protect African artists from the lingering structures of colonial power. Responsibility, she maintained, lay both with the individual who carried out the act and with the institution that enabled it.¹⁷

We still don’t know what Mame Coumba Bang looked like. After the Musée dynamique’s closure in 1988, much of the national collection was scattered, including this artwork.¹⁸ According to accounts in Le Soleil, however, the painting Mame Coumba Bang, which depicted the titular deity, was part of a six-painting series representing protector spirits from each region of Senegal.¹⁹ Mame Coumba Bang, the river goddess of Seye’s hometown, carries importance as a protector of the Saint-Louis branch of the Sénégal River. Other paintings in the series were likely named for different titular spirits. Across Wolof, Lébou, and other cultures, female water deities are revered for their ability to shelter residents from misfortune, ailments, and infertility. Wolof people adore Mame Coumba Bang, and ritual offerings to her remain common.²⁰ Seye’s invocation of Mame Coumba Bang personified the goddess as a nourisher and protector of the country—just as the river nourishes the land and its people.

By depicting a pantheon of female deities, Seye continued her practice of routing local symbolism through feminine iconography. For example, in L’Afrique Nourricière (c. 1970), Seye depicted three women producing milk from their pierced breasts. For Seye, the painting reflects the essential role of women as sustainers. When asked about the painting, she asserted that womankind “is the guardian of our traditions, mother, wife, educator. She is everything and everything revolves around her.”²¹ Likewise, Light Bearer (1971) depicts a female figure carrying a torch, which can be interpreted as symbolizing women’s roles in transmitting cultural traditions (fig. 3).²² Mame Coumba Bang thus fits squarely within Seye’s broader oeuvre. 

Mame Coumba Bang’s symbolism deepens with its materiality. According to the report in Le Soleil, Seye had woven the cowries onto a tuft of yoss.²³ Seye likely used yoss in the painting to celebrate its prominence in Senegalese feminine worlds, where it was historically employed by Senegalese women in the making of wigs, braids, and elaborate hairstyles, before the advent of synthetic fibers.²⁴ The fiber’s derivation from the land additionally highlights Seye’s attachment to nature. The gathering of yoss and cowries encapsulates themes essential to Seye’s work: her proud rootedness in Senegal, her reverence for the natural world, and an emphasis on womanhood. 

The choices of material, subject, and symbolism magnified the gendered stakes of the vandalism at the Salon: someone cut a tuft of yoss from the painting, causing it to shed fiber and cowries. Though the culprit was never publicly named, Seye claims he was a colleague who later confessed privately that he had defaced her painting out of jealousy.²⁵ Symbolically, this perpetrator cut away the trademark African and feminine dimensions of Seye’s work. Materially, too, the act jeopardized the chance that the jury would select Mame Coumba Bang to tour internationally with Art sénégalais d’aujourd’hui. Ultimately, despite the controversy and swarming accusations, the jury chose two of Seye’s pieces, Femme aux cauris (n.d.) and La danse des cauris, to tour with the exhibition in 1974 (fig. 2). Seye was the only woman in the show, which traveled internationally until 1980.

Mame Coumba Bang survives today only in fragments—in hostile press clippings and the artist’s own recollections. Its destruction exposes the fault lines in Senegal’s postindependence art world, where state patronage, neocolonial cultural agents, and gendered hierarchies coexisted with genuine ambitions for emancipation. Seye’s differential treatment as a self-taught woman—as a woman artist who forged a singular artistic path during this moment of decolonization—became visible precisely when her work required care, protection, and institutional recognition. That the painting itself is now lost only sharpens its significance. What was cut away in 1974 was not simply a tuft of yoss, but also the possibility that feminine, spiritual, and materially grounded artistic practices could be fully safeguarded within national cultural institutions. Reading Mame Coumba Bang through its defacement thus clarifies the terms under which artists like Seye were asked to create and the costs of doing so on their own terms.

The authors gratefully acknowledge the insightful editorial guidance of Merve Fejzula.

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Ashamallah was born in 1948, the year of the Nakba or “catastrophe,” a paradigmatic rupture that would change the course of history and redefine the trajectory of Egyptian nation-building.² Her life thereafter has been decidedly marked by events that punctuate the making of modern Egypt. Like many Egyptians, her sense of time is structured by presidential eras (Nasser, Mubarak), wars (the Six-Day War, Al Naksa, the War of Attrition), and agreements (Camp David, Oslo). These sweeping, large-scale, political shifts have reverberated in Ashamallah’s private life. Indeed, President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization policies impoverished her formerly middle-class family, and her brother’s martyrdom in the 1967 War of Attrition is a tragedy that has deeply afflicted her. 

Ashamallah grew up in Desouk, a provincial town in the Egyptian Nile River Delta region of Kafr-el-Sheikh, amid rural traditions that continue to influence her painting and drawing today. Though her Christian family was not originally from this region, they lived in Desouk because her father was assigned there to oversee life insurance policies. At home, her father’s library was rich with literature, which she pored over. Outside, she climbed sycamore trees, befriended the local livestock, and sang folk songs with the neighboring children. She planted rice and other seeds on her aunt’s land, fascinated by watching how plants grow and yield fruits for picking. Today, her imagination is still populated by the creatures, real and invented, that inhabited her early childhood. 

Against Canonization 

When prodded about the imaginative tropes in her work, Ashamallah sings a song that the village women would sing in a processional held at night during the lunar eclipse. Her artwork, which contains elements from Egyptian folklore and Pharaonic motifs—often hybridized alongside figments of her own imagination—offers novel interpretations of traditional forms. Ashamallah’s apartment is filled with paintings, and one that stands out is Hathour and Her Egg (1995), a large, prominent portrayal in her living room of the Pharaonic goddess Hathour (fig. 1). Ashamallah has been consistently preoccupied with the female figure and feminine prowess, as is evident in her depiction of Hathour, mother of all the Pharaohs and a goddess who represents the sky, motherhood, fertility, beauty, music, and joy. When asked what inspires these figures, she recounted a pivotal discovery: that the female mantis eats her partner by decapitating it after they have mated. Though Ashamallah did not elaborate further, it makes sense that the violence and beauty inherent to the natural process of mantis-mating could have inspired her to depict insect-like creatures as well as women with plants or other creatures inside their bellies. For Ashamallah, the female body is the touchstone of creation, the alpha and omega.³
 

It is challenging to attach Ashamallah to a particular school or “ism”—Expressionism, Primitivism, Surrealism. Instead, she weaves in and out of these styles at whim, eluding categorization by reworking forms that present her unique worldview. Though she received highly formal Beaux Arts–style training, she often surrenders her traditional education to follow the lead of her imagination. Her compositions present the world as she remembers it: full of trials and tribulations and marked by the simultaneity of euphoria and desolation. As an artist, her confidence in her own vision has always been steadfast. She recounts being on a field trip in middle school and visiting the Fine Arts Library. When her friend asked her, “Have you seen Picasso?” she responded, “Who is Picasso? I am Evelyn Ashamallah.” 

Her politics are seldom explicitly manifest in her artwork, though on certain occasions, she has illustrated specific political events, such as the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre or the ongoing genocide in Gaza (fig. 2). Nevertheless, most of her paintings and drawings are not didactic. When looking back on her body of work, it is difficult not to read certain pieces as parallels to the large-scale political transformations taking place in the background at the time they were made. Compositions featuring peasants tilling their land or astronauts (fig. 3), aliens, and UFOs evoke societal changes such as the 1952 Land Reform Law, which redistributed Egypt’s arable land, or the establishment of a national space program in 1960. 

As a young artist, Ashamallah found herself caught in the 20th-century gestation of a new republic. She graduated from the Painting Department of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Alexandria in 1973 and then moved to Cairo. There, not yet fully embracing her painting practice, she worked as a journalist for Rūz al-Yūsuf, a weekly political magazine that had just begun distribution in the Gulf countries. Her first piece, published in August 1973, was on the bride economy between the Gulf and Egypt. As an investigative journalist, she shed light on cases of newly wealthy Arabs from Saudi Arabia and the Emirates who would come to various rural places across Egypt and purchase young girls to bring home as wives. After this fearless debut, she earned a living by writing similar political, investigative editorial pieces until a disagreement with her editor led her to find work elsewhere. In 1977, the Egyptian government issued a warrant for Ashamallah’s arrest for her alleged involvement in leftist political activity. Forced to leave the country until they were no longer targets of the Egyptian state, she and her husband, journalist Mahmoud Yousri, moved to Algeria, where they lived in exile for six years. While she would not return to journalism, she was always involved in her husband’s editorial work and has remained an avid writer. Later in her practice, she began incorporating her writings into her artwork.

During one of our interviews, I asked Ashamallah about her relationship to politics after the 2011 uprising in Tahrir Square, in which she played a prominent role as a leading dissident and organizer. She discussed how, in retrospect, almost fifteen years later, she sees “how naive and blind we were, how we didn’t understand anything.”⁴ Now, after a lifetime of involvement in different political groups—ranging from leftist to Marxist to Socialist to Communist throughout regime changes and political fluctuations—Ashamallah wants her artwork to be free of political determinations and social burdens. As she explained to me, “They’re free to politicize whatever they want. For me, what do I do? What is good for me to do? I paint. Let me paint.”⁵
 

Exile and Early Drawings

In our discussions, Ashamallah referenced multiple times how the farmers’ fields inspired her developing visual language as a young girl.⁶ Despite this, she did not demonstrate interest in landscape painting while a student in Alexandria. Instead, she preferred riding the tram all day long and watching—and drawing—the hustle-bustle. It was not until she arrived in Tiaret, Algeria, in 1977 and encountered the topography of the agricultural province that she began drawing landscapes. Before traveling to Algeria, she had never seen such majestic hillsides. Given the flat, agricultural lands of her childhood, she was captivated by the different elevations in her first landscapes, which are often rendered in flat compositions with multiple planes stacked on top of each other. This compositional structure has remained present throughout her work, as she still typically divides the surface—whether cardboard, canvas, or paper—into sections that she then populates with original forms.

Landscape in Algeria (1980) is made of quasi-organic, geometric shapes that are common in her other illustrations from this time (fig. 4). Inspired by local crafts within the Amazigh tradition, Ashamallah borrowed certain forms that suited her desire to blend human figures with bushes, and trees with architecture. This hybridization is a constant throughout her artistic practice, whereby people are depicted with plantlike traits, and animal-creatures float in boundless spaces, undisturbed by the laws of perspective or gravity. 

In Algeria, Ashamallah’s husband only found sporadic work as a schoolteacher, and so they struggled to make ends meet. Though she never stopped drawing (“not even for one day”), it was a rare joy for her to receive colors, and when she did, she gravitated toward the saturated tones that she would later use in her acrylic works. 

When they moved from Tiaret to the capital of Algiers, Ashamallah developed a tight-knit community of friends from the political, intellectual, and artistic milieus across the Arab region—Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and, of course, Algeria. She was influenced by many of the conversations that took place at this time. The Algerian modernist artist Mohammed Khadda states in his essay “Elements for a New Art,” which he wrote fresh out of the Algerian War (1954–62) in 1964, “Our country is taking the socialist path, and the artist—like the worker and the peasant, has a duty to participate in the edification of this new world, in which man will no longer exploit man.”⁷ Though Ashamallah never directly references Khadda—except for in a side conversation in which she notes his calligraphic forms with admiration—it is clear that Ashamallah shares some of the concerns he waged in the formation of the new independent Algeria. She was inspired by the goings-on around her and has spoken extensively about the importance of her time in Algeria in her personal life and artistic trajectory.

In 1984, Ashamallah returned to an Egypt that was fundamentally different from the country she had left: one that was rife with economic disparity, increasingly common sectarian clashes, and a new age of political repression under the leadership of President Hosni Mubarak. Nevertheless, determined to support her children and continue making art, Ashamallah engaged with formal cultural apparatuses, staging exhibitions in state-run venues such as the Cairo Atelier (1986), among others. In the 1990s, she served as director of the Mohamed Nagy Museum in Giza before becoming director of the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art in Cairo. In 2011, she left this post, emphatically exposed the corruption within the Ministry of Culture, and took to Tahrir Square. 

The Rural Trace

Now, as Ashamallah has lived longer in the dense urbanity of Cairo than in its rural environs, she continues to derive inspiration from the landscape that defined her youth. It is there that she identifies the “Egyptian spirit” in its truth and essence. This portrayal of the rural as the “essence” of the nation, and the peasant as the “true Egyptian,” defined art historical, literary, and political debates in Egyptian modernism throughout the 20th century. In 1911, the newly established Egyptian Faculty of Fine Arts opened with a European curriculum and the following aim: “After having taught the students the conventional rules of each art, the professors shall endeavour to develop in them a taste for a national art, that which should become the expression of the modern civilized Egyptian. This will be thanks to what is available to them through the remarkable examples they see of Egyptian monuments and relics and of the Golden Age of Arab art.”⁸

Egyptian modernists responded to this prompt by representing the rural Egyptian, a figure that could potentially unite a heterogeneous population seeking a national identity.⁹ As did the artists Mahmoud Saïd (1897–1964), Seif Wanly (1906–1979) and his brother Adham Wanly (1908–1959), Ragheb Ayad (1892–1982), Mahmoud Naghi (1888–1956), Hamed Owais (1919–2011), and Injy Aflatoun (1924–1989) before her, Ashamallah identified the rural condition as the ultimate, defining feature of Egyptian society. Like them, she occupied an insider-outsider position, portraying the peasant from close proximity though never fully occupying the role herself. 

In the scramble to locate a static Egyptian national identity, images of peasants and the agricultural landscape they tilled—an unchanging constant across dynasties, kingdoms, and empires of rule—became a fixture in Egyptian artistic representation of the 20th century.¹⁰ From Mahmoud Said’s 1938 portrait Fille à l’imprimé (Girl in a Printed Dress) to Mahmoud Mokhtar’s 1930 sculpture Au Bord du Nil (On the Banks of the Nile) or Injy Aflatoun’s 1963 L’Or Blanc (White Gold), the Egyptian modernists were obsessed with portraying the “ordinary Egyptian” in a rural setting. There is no doubt that this practice was highly influential in Evelyn Ashamallah’s work, with some of her early works portraying women as abstract, organic figures that resemble Mokhtarian sculptures. 

In 1986, Ashamallah borrowed from the tropes of peasant representation (for example, the jagged portraiture of Hamed Oweais and the rural stereotypes of Ragheb Ayad) in Portrait or Analysis of the features of the Egyptian peasant, a profile sketch with a pseudo-Pharaonic phrenology (fig. 5). While this portrait borrows from Ashamallah’s antecedents, it also demonstrates the germination of some of her signature features: the almond-shaped hollow eyes and large skull. Over time, she further developed her own typologies of representation, departing from the rural depictions typical in the work of earlier Egyptian modernists.

In her 1990 drawing The Peasants’ Hope, Ashamallah employs the signature stacked composition she used in her early Algerian landscapes to completely recast a tired and pernicious rural trope (fig. 6). In the left of the composition, a woman with curly hair and an earring in the form of a striped bird diving downward is rendered in closeup profile above an underworld inhabited by part-sea part-human creatures, who swim toward a twirling structure at the surface. Above it, a central figure is positioned in the typical Pharaonic stance, wherein the feet point in one direction, and the body and head face the viewer. This figure also wears bird-like jewelry as well as a snake on its head. On the right, the artist stacks three figures on top of each other to make one hybrid creature: a crouching man, a bird-woman, and a flower-child. Each figure in this totemic trio relates to a figment from Ashamallah’s memory. Free from the stereotypical tropes that were common in the work of her predecessors, Ashamallah portrays what she knows about Egyptian peasants. Perhaps her renderings are acts of subversion, but it is more likely that they are forms of fantastical futurity, pointing to a time when humans, animals, land, sea, and sky will have all collapsed into an incongruent harmony.  

Throughout the 1990s into the early 2000s, Ashamallah dove further into the interspecies realms that had long populated her imagination. In the work from this period, we can begin to identify recurring motifs, including femininity, motherhood, and birth, which are conveyed by pregnant creatures or by characters contained in eggs, and womanhood in the form of reptilian beings with full breasts. These works almost always contain an unbridled articulation of humor and whimsy. As time progressed, Ashamallah depicted her figures with more limbs, tails, and fins, and she portrayed their encounters with even more levity. In her droll renderings, she would imagine conversations between different species that, as she has stated, “are not so easy to understand.” In her painting Balance (1993), we see her signature saturated colors deployed in the portrayal of four figures spilling over four quadrants of a composition (fig. 7). A turnip-headed red boy lies on his stomach and swings his feet next to a blue star creature with red lips, who smiles directly at the viewer. On the bottom of the composition, another red boy balances a reptilian figure in his mouth and an upside-down pyramid on his foot. As in Ashamallah’s other works, the composition is split and stacked, with each section containing a creature floating in its own respective world, yet brought into conversation with the other creatures in their whimsical portrayal.

In the fall of 2024, Ashamallah’s largest retrospective opened at Azad Art Gallery in Cairo’s Zamalek neighborhood. Titled The Harvest of a Lifetime, this exhibition was organized by decade, demonstrating Ashamallah’s evolution as an artist and offering unfettered access to her phantasmagorical world.¹¹ In some ways, Ashamallah’s ongoing legacy fits squarely into an art historical evolution of Egyptian modernism that draws key articulations from the rural. However, her representations offer something much more alluring than those of her predecessors. In reading her paintings and drawings alongside her writings, her exile, her political engagement, and then her disengagement, it becomes clear that her imagination is her antidote to the injustices that she has borne witness to throughout her life. She knows that this world-building is not entirely her own creation, as it follows the folktales and customs that surrounded her as a child. Now, looking back on a life laden with the contradictions, affiliations, and disaffiliations not uncommon to those navigating the rubble of the 20th century, Ashamallah consciously returns to the land, still, still invigorated by the potential of its promise (fig 8). 

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Artistic photobooks in Japan had originated some years earlier, when photographers and architecture students who had studied at the Bauhaus returned home with modernist ideas. Publications like Sensation of Flight (詩画集 飛行官能 / Hiko Kanno) (1934) and New Compositions of Beauty of Human Anatomy (人体美の新構成 /Jintaibi no Shin Kōsei ) (1932) were part of this avant-garde movement influenced by European photography.³ The Japanese military, recognizing photography’s potential early on, had been using photo publications for propaganda since the late 19th century.

After World War II, the photobook became a key outlet for expression outside the official or institutional art world, especially given the lack of a gallery infrastructure and the overall economic instability. Photobooks were often printed in relatively affordable editions, combining documentary content with a graphic-design sensibility. Notable examples include Hiroshi Hamaya’s Japan’s Back Coast (裏日本 / Ura Nihon) (1957) and Ken Domon’s (ヒロシマ / Hiroshima) (1958), both of which highlight social issues and underrepresented communities.⁴

In this earlier period, from the 1930s to the 1950s, the foundation was laid for the golden age of Japanese photobooks in the 1960s and 1970s, when the photobook became an artistic object in itself—the definitive expression of photography. Kikuji Kawada’s The Map (地図 / Chizu) (1965) epitomizes this shift. During this era, photographers challenged modern photography and documentary traditions, using abstraction and experimental visual language as forms of political and social critique. This trend culminated in the radical break marked by Provoke (1968–1970), a magazine that reshaped the trajectory of Japanese photography.

Despite photography’s growing role in postwar Japan, female photographers remained largely overlooked by art historians and critics. The 1950s saw significant changes in Japanese society, with women entering a wider range of occupations, including photography. However, their role in the context of photography was often limited to that of a studio assistant who primarily handled retouching for a male photographer. Moreover, it was a profession that many women abandoned upon marriage. While Japan’s first photographic school for women had opened in 1902,⁵ it did so 40 years later than its male counterpart, reflecting the broader gender disparities in artistic and professional recognition. Within this male-dominated industry, women struggled to gain legitimacy as independent photographers.

Toyoko Tokiwa (1928–2019) was born in Yokohama and grew up during the devastating years of war and occupation. She developed an early interest in photography, inspired by her elder brother who was also a photographer. After finishing high school, she studied home economics in Tokyo but defied family expectations to marry, choosing instead to pursue a career in photography. She joined the Shirayuri Camera Club (白百合カメラクラブ/ Shirayuri Kamera Kurabu), a social club that evolved into a learning hub where women practitioners honed their skills under the guidance of established male photographers. Tokiwa was interested in capturing the lives of working women, particularly those whose work involved their bodies. Through this focus, she critiqued the gendered division within postwar photography culture and asserted the subjectivity and agency of women photographers.⁶

Her series Working Women (働く女性 / Hataraku Josei) was published in the June 1957 issue of Women’s Review magazine (婦人公論 / Fujin Kōron). Carrie Cushman and Kelly Midori McCormick note that her work’s placement in women’s magazines rather than in photography publications shows that she was disregarded by photography historians of her time.⁷ Working Women was exhibited in Tokyo in 1956 at the Konishiroku Photo Gallery in the district of Ginza. Critics at the time agreed that only a woman could have taken these photographs because a man would not have been able to access the spaces they document. Tokiwa, however, disliked the implication that a woman could only produce exhibition-worthy work when she photographed such subjects.⁸ Shortly thereafter, when she was approached by publisher Mikasa Shobo to produce a photobook titled Dangerous Poisonous Flowers (危険な毒花 / Kikenna Adabana) (1957) based on the Working Women series, she became the first female photographer to publish a photobook in Japan.

While many male photographers of the time focused on postwar devastation, urbanization, and political protests, Tokiwa centered women’s everyday lives and labor. As one of few professional female photographers and someone working with explicitly gendered subject matter, she created a photobook that was not only formally democratic in its accessible format but also socially transgressive. In offering a female-centered narrative within a photographic documentary landscape overwhelmingly shaped by male perspectives, it challenged dominant visual and social hierarchies.

Tokiwa’s photographs align with social realism and emerging subjectivity movements of her time, yet they embody a radical form of empathy as a distinct way of seeing. In her work, empathy becomes a critical factor, and the photobook the platform upon which this vision unfolds most powerfully. Tokiwa’s portraits of sex workers and other working women resist voyeurism and instead foreground relational intimacy. Her lens does not objectify her subjects but rather invites the viewer into their world to bear witness. The sequential format and the physical intimacy between the viewer and the photographs—elements inherent in the photobook form—invite personal engagement, offering a more egalitarian viewing experience than is possible in an austere traditional gallery setting. In this way, Tokiwa subverted the visual conventions shaped by the “male gaze,” a concept introduced by Laura Mulvey in her influential essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), in which she argues that dominant visual culture tends to position women as passive objects of heterosexual male desire.⁹ This present essay argues that Tokiwa’s photographic disposition fleshed out, for the first time in the history of Japanese photography, a “female gaze,” one that centers empathy, subjectivity, and emotional resonance, and established a new approach to social documentary, one that I theorize as the “empathetic gaze.” The concept of the female gaze emerged as a counterpoint to Laura Mulvey’s framework. As filmmaker Jill Soloway describes it, the female gaze is a sociopolitical, justice-demanding way of art-making. It is a conscious effort to create empathy as a political tool. It changes the way the world feels about women when they move their bodies through the world, fully feeling themselves as the subject.¹⁰

Tokiwa’s Dangerous Poisonous Flowers deepens our understanding of the empathetic approach and exemplifies how the photobook served as its platform while also being a more democratic form of photographic expression. Unlike exhibitions, which are confined to specific spaces and audiences, the photobook allowed for broader circulation and accessibility, reaching viewers from diverse backgrounds. Publisher Mikasa Shobo was not primarily known for art or photography publications; indeed, after the war, the majority of its titles focused on popular literature and translations of works by English-language novelists, such as Ernest Hemingway, and catered to a general readership interested in fiction and Western ideas.¹¹ We can assume that Tokiwa’s photobook reached a wide audience based on its publication history. While exact sales numbers are not available, the book was reprinted multiple times in 1957, the year it was published, suggesting significant circulation and sustained demand.¹² The photobook reached at least its eleventh printing that same year, indicating its widespread popularity and impact.

The title “Dangerous Poisonous Flowers” is a traditional euphemism for sex workers.¹³ The cover of the book features a self-portrait of Tokiwa behind the lens, foregrounding her photographic labor and positioning her as another working woman (fig. 1). This image emphasizes her unique perspective, highlighting her identity as a female photographer. The close-up shot makes the image more relatable for women readers, who recognize themselves in the figure pictured. Inside Tokiwa’s lens, a photomontage shows a man and woman holding each other. But on closer inspection, it becomes clear that the man is forcing the woman to accompany him, dragging her in a way that suggests violence. Although Tokiwa disliked the image because it was staged (as she reveals in her interview with Kelly Midori McCormick¹⁴), this image reinforces the theme of the book, addressing the struggles of being a working woman in a male-dominated world.

The book was printed using photogravure, a printing process that enriches the black tones and was often used at the time for magazines like Women’s Review (婦人公論 / Fujin Kōron) (1916–present) and Ladies’ Club (婦人倶楽部 / Fujin Kurabu) (1920–1988). This printing method, along with the arrangement of the images and choice of paper, mimics those publications in material and composition, perhaps catering to a female readership familiar with such formats. The predominantly dark photos heighten the atmospheric quality of the hidden world revealed in the images. The 248-page photobook unfolds like a memoir, with its extensive first-person narrative evoking the personal nature of a diary. This sense of intimacy is reinforced by its compact size (approximately 7 ½ × 5 ¼ inches), which invites physical closeness with the object, while the absence of borders around the photographs draws the reader into their world. Tokiwa’s autobiographical notes throughout the book enhance its journal-like quality, offering personal reflections on her early years, the process of photographing her subjects, and her evolving thoughts on photography and gender. This combination of text and image, a common style in photo publications at the time, creates a narrative experience that blends visual and written storytelling. The structure of the book—interweaving expansive text chapters with photographic sequences, each marking distinct phases in Tokiwa’s journey—further enhances the book’s diaristic character. The use of first-person narration and the short anecdotal captions accompanying some of the images make it feel as though Tokiwa has directly inscribed the pages, deepening the connection between her and the reader.

A substantial number of photographs in the book are focused on sex workers in the red-light district of Yokohama (fig. 2). The photobook also extends beyond this setting, capturing images of nude models engaged in photo sessions, female wrestlers, divers, and street performers, offering a broader perspective on women who earn a living by using their bodies (fig. 3).

In the accompanying text, Tokiwa reflects on the challenges and dangers she faced while working, particularly within the red-light districts. Armed with her camera and dressed in a skirt and a pair of clogs, she wandered through these shadowy and often dangerous areas. It was precisely her appearance as a young woman that enabled her to move unnoticed and to gain the trust of the women she encountered. They welcomed her into their world and offered her glimpses into their private lives, willingly posing before her lens. “They trusted me because I was wearing a skirt. If I wore trousers, I would have been looked at with alarm,” she explained.¹⁵

As we flip through Tokiwa’s photobook, we witness her evolution from detachment to empathy. Initially, she resents her subjects for what she perceives to be their betrayal of nation and dignity, a feeling evident in her early photographs, most of which were taken from a distance. In figure 4, the prostitutes appear as background figures, seemingly barely noticed by the blurry, shadowy figures in the foreground, perhaps alluding to society’s disregard for their existence. Over time, Tokiwa builds connections with her subjects, capturing them with increasing understanding and compassion. As her work progresses, she moves closer, entering their personal spaces and thereby conveying a more firsthand perspective (fig. 5).

When comparing Tokiwa’s images to those of her contemporary male photographers, such as Shomei Tomatsu (1930–2012), a leading figure in postwar social documentary, a noticeable difference emerges. In Tomatsu’s Prostitute, Nagoya (1958), the artist’s famous photograph of a prostitute, his subject appears defensive, her expression suggesting that she is filled with anger at or at least disapproval of the male photographer’s incursion into her private moment. In contrast, Tokiwa captured her subjects in more relaxed, unguarded moments, often during their free time. In her photographs, her subjects meet her gaze, and we sense in this encounter a feeling of approval or trust. In figure 5, Tokiwa has entered the women’s home, where the central figure (on the left), who appears laid-back, is enjoying a drink and a cigarette. She is surrounded by other women, who also seem to be engaging in their usual routines. Tokiwa’s presence feels natural, as if she is part of their world. As McCormick notes, “[Tokiwa] shifts her position from repulsed voyeur to a photographer with a consciousness.”¹⁶ Ultimately, in shedding light on the realities of sex workers’ everyday lives, using photography as a tool for awareness and advocacy, Tokiwa’s work goes beyond documentation. As the photographer comments in her book, “When I first started, I didn’t feel love for them, maybe hatred. However, when I got into their lives, their rooms, and had tea with them, I realized that these dogs were humans after all. . . . I take these pictures to raise awareness of the negative aspects of the prostitution system.”¹⁷

Tokiwa’s ability to gain her subjects’ trust, to position herself as a participant rather than an intruder in their world, enabled her to photograph them in their intimate settings, capturing their true nature and emotions through her lens. This approach constitutes what can be understood as a “female gaze.” Unlike the traditional male perspective, which often imposes power dynamics of control and objectification, Tokiwa’s images center subjectivity and empathy and aim at awareness. Her camera creates space for the women to appear as full, complex individuals rather than symbols of marginalization or desire. This empathetic way of seeing not only challenges the viewer to look at these women differently but also reinforces the role of photography as a tool for sociopolitical change.

Tokiwa experienced the devastation of World War II, including the bombing of her home during the Yokohama Great Air Attack in 1945, which killed her father. After the US military took control of Yokohama’s harbor, she developed a deep resentment toward American soldiers and channeled this anger through photography. As she explains in Dangerous Poison Flowers, “I took my camera and went to the Yokohama port to comfort my feelings of hatred against the American soldiers while pointing my camera at them.”¹⁸.

Tokiwa’s photographs document US soldiers exploiting Japanese sex workers in the red-light districts. This subject matter parallels the work of male photographers like Shomei Tomatsu, Takuma Nakahira (1938–2015), and Daidō Moriyama (born 1938), who likewise captured the impact of the American occupation of Japan. Ross Tunney describes the US military bases in Japan as embodying the “symbolic rape” of Japan, reflecting the fears of “miscegenation” held by many Japanese people.¹⁹ In Tokiwa’s images (figs. 6, 7), this symbolic rape is powerfully evoked, with the Japanese women depicted as both victims and symbols of a coerced and weakened Japan. Tokiwa’s focus, however, is not on the soldiers but rather on the women’s faces and postures. This shift in perspective gives the women agency, transforming them from passive victims into individuals marked by resilience and strength.

In the second photo sequence in the book, we follow Tokiwa as she enters a hospital in which prostitutes are seeking medical treatment. Hiding her camera under a white coat, she pretended to be the doctor’s assistant, which enabled her to capture intimate and disturbing scenes like the moment of injection. As a female photographer, Tokiwa felt a unique connection to these women, seeing and relating to them in a way that male photographers could not. She sought to reveal their lives “under their skin,” to show their vulnerability.²⁰ The women, who in most cases seem unaware of Tokiwa’s presence, appear vulnerable and tired. One image captures a woman who, having just received a penicillin shot, lies on a hospital bed with her face down and a cigarette in hand (fig. 9). Tokiwa has noted on the side of the image, “She looked like she was exhausted from living” and reveals that it was a scene that left a strong impression on her.²¹ Depicting her subjects as patients offers an unconventional portrayal of prostitution while also alluding to the way prostitution is looked upon as a societal illness.

Tokiwa’s ultimate motivation was to shed light on the harsh realities faced by women whose labor involves their bodies. Her goal was to bring attention to their plight and, in doing so, to foster empathy and awareness. At the same time, she aimed to challenge the stigma attached to sex workers, asserting their humanity and dignity in the face of societal judgment. With remarkable honesty, she reflects on their labor and living conditions, weaving together personal anecdotes and the stories of the women she encountered, offering unconventional portraits of women who were typically idealized by male photographers.

Tokiwa’s photobook not only challenged dominant narratives about sex workers and other working women but also made space for marginalized female voices, both those of her subjects and her own as a rare female photographer in a male-dominated field. Dangerous Poisonous Flowers functioned as a feminist manifesto of its time, incorporating powerful language and imagery that not only empowered women but also exposed their gender-based oppression as workers and artists. In these extensive written passages and photo sequences, she reveals the challenges of being a female photographer and the struggles she faced in completing her project.

From the opening sentence of her book, Tokiwa makes a powerful statement about gender biases in photography: “Does being a woman, rather than a man, give you any disadvantage in taking photos?”²² These words not only challenge established stereotypes at the time but also serve as a testament to the sexist discrimination she endured at the beginning of her career. On the contrary, she believed that it was the very nature of women that made them more capable than men in documentary photography. In Dangerous Poisonous Flowers, she declares: “There is a feminine element to photography. Photographers must have a passive stance to get the subject to accept being photographed. . . . Most of my work was made because I am a woman.”²³

Tokiwa’s photographic work evokes that belief, as we see her subjects allowing her to capture them in their most vulnerable and personal circumstances. What makes her approach unique and compelling is her empathetic gaze, which is free of idealization and marked by a sense of belonging. Empathy, in this case, is a transgressive act, as it challenges the dominant documentary tradition characterized by detachment, domination, and objectification. Instead of reinforcing the viewer’s power over the subject, Tokiwa’s gaze fosters proximity and emotional connection. The empathetic gaze is also a female gaze. Both are grounded in care, presence, and a refusal to look from a position of power, allowing the subjects to reveal their own idea of themselves. The term “empathetic gaze” emerges not as a departure from the female gaze, but rather as a way to articulate its specific emotional and political mechanisms, particularly how it invites viewers to feel with, rather than look at, the photographed subjects. In this sense, the “empathetic gaze” is both a way of seeing and engaging with the subject and an artistic practice that challenges dominant representations and redefines the relationship between viewer and subject.

The book concludes with photographs Tokiwa took in a rehabilitation facility in Kanagawa, where young women from the red-light district were sent after the anti-prostitution law was enacted in Japan in 1956. She photographed them during their free time (working at their sewing machines, arranging flowers, eating), believing that these moments reveal their true natures. These images, accompanied by her words, also reveal a deepening compassion for the working women she had followed for several years.

This final sequence, without context, could easily depict a girls’ school. The women are shown during the day, either attending classes or playing sports, with their bright, clear faces exposed to the lens and radiating innocence. They appear relaxed and absorbed in their activities. Tokiwa is no longer hiding from her subjects. She is present in their daily lives, placing them in front of her lens, against the bright sunlight. She has become one of them. In figure 10, the girls are arranging flowers. The flowers take prominence in the foreground, and the girls seem to blend into them, almost appearing as flowers themselves, reinforcing the title of the book. This scene deeply moved Tokiwa, who writes, “The dirt of the past is washed away clean, and the innocent feelings of young girls, placed in a normal environment, are transformed into a flower arrangement. Even withered and lifeless flowers are still flowers.”²⁴

This essay is the outcome of my research trip to Japan in April 2024, which took place in the context of my internship with the International Program of The Museum of Modern Art. I am grateful to curator Yamada Yuri of the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, who introduced me to Toyoko Tokiwa’s photobook. I also want to thank Carlos Quijon, Jr., C-MAP Southeast & East Asia Fellow at the International Program for his guidance through this process. A copy of this rare publication is available in MoMA’s Library, thanks to the support of the International Program.

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Her pottery’s forms and stylistic motifs were derived from Gbari culture and shared among women of her indigenous group (fig. 1). Kwali would go on to make hundreds of waterpots and other thrown wares featuring varied geometric and figurative designs inspired by nature, including animals and plants. This was a way for the artist to intentionally incorporate the Gbari design vernacular in earthenware and stoneware as she developed as a potter. The distinctive blend of traditional Indigenous Gbari pottery and British studio pottery represents Ladi Kwali’s shift from a local ceramist to an international one. This transition—influenced by cultural exchanges occurring in Nigeria when the country was still under British colonial rule—tainted the project with uneven power dynamics that, though problematic, shaped and defined Ladi Kwali’s global acclaim.

In a photograph of Ladi Kwali taken during a pottery demonstration in England in the 1970s by William Alfred Ismay (W. A. Ismay), the most active collector of British studio pottery at the time, Ladi Kwali is elegantly dressed in a pale blue polo shirt, brown patterned wrapper, earrings, and a brown silk head tie (fig. 2). Captured deep in concentration, she is shown incising a waterpot. Kwali was known for her fashion sense, a blend of traditional and Western styles of dress, mainly via the many demonstrations she carried out while touring Europe and the United States in 1962 and 1972, respectively.⁴ Kwali’s choice in clothing belies the physicality of her work, which required that she thrust her fist into a giant ball of clay and then, while circling it, stretch up what would become the wall of the pot with a scraper. She would go on to build the upper half with thick coils, paddle the whole vessel into shape, smooth and decorate it with roller patterns, and finally, incise it with Gbari figures of different creatures.

At the time of this photo, Kwali was in her late forties and had honed her craft in the Gbari tradition of hand-built pottery. Having demonstrated remarkable mastery, she had gained not only national acclaim but also international recognition for her work.⁵ Her precision and steady hand in using sharp blade-like tools to inscribe the clay resulted in the distinct lines visible on the vessel’s surface. In an interview, British Kenyan ceramist Magdalene A. N. Odundo (born 1950) reminisced about Kwali’s attention to detail, stating: “Oh boy, it was amazing. She would point out the mistakes I had made. It was her eye that had the ability to see, form, and correct it. She had a sense of geometry in her bones.” Odundo recounted that Ladi Kwali would “dance” around her pot as she raised and smoothed it, singing in pleasure at her success.⁶ Odundo had previously recalled meeting Kwali in 1974, when the younger potter began working at the Abuja Pottery Training Centre (now in Suleja). Odundo was introduced to Kwali by Michael Cardew (1901–1983), the center’s founder and a pioneer of the British studio pottery movement widely credited for reviving the slipware tradition in England, whom she had met while a student in Farnham that same year.⁷ This experience profoundly shaped her path and solidified her decision to pursue a career in pottery.

Ladi Kwali was heavily tattooed with symbols, and as Ismay’s photograph records, her name was prominently marked on her inner left arm, where the words “Akou Mista Dase, Ladi Kwali” are visible. In this iconic image, she firmly secures the pot by its rim with her left hand while making an incision down its wide belly with her right. Geometric horizontal bands are visible on the neck of the vessel. In his report titled Ladi Kwali: Nigeria’s Potter Extraordinary, which he prepared for the board of trustees of the Nigerian National Order of Merit, C. O. Adepegba proposes that Kwali’s tattoos are an extension of the decorative motifs that adorn Gbari pottery wares: “Since Ladi Kwali had tattoos of geometric figures on her body, it is easy to identify body markings among the Gbari as the only source of her geometric designs.”⁸ The report also cites observations made by historians Sarah Riddick and Clara Hieronymus that reference geometric-patterned tattoos, notably those on the backs of Gbari women and echoed in the designs on decorative pottery and, in varied form, on calabashes, wood carvings, and leatherwork in Kwali town and other parts of Nigeria. One could also speculate that Kwali’s tattoos and pottery designs reflect her deep engagement with folkloric and cultural symbolism and with the natural world and animals.

Kwali used the direct-pull method, which involves hand-building a waterpot directly from a lump of clay, to create pots like the one shown in Ismay’s photograph. This method enabled her to form a short, plump-bellied vessel with a narrow, flared-lip neck. To make taller vessels of different shapes, she used a makeshift rounded disk to create a small pot, which she then enlarged by adding clay coils. As she built up the body of the piece, she circled it clockwise and then counterclockwise, walking steadily backward while dragging one foot to maintain balance—a technique widely practiced by potters undertaking hand-building because it helps to prevent dizziness.

Ladi Kwali first encountered Michael Cardew in 1954, a few years after he arrived in Nigeria to take up his appointment as a senior potter officer employed by the Nigerian colonial government. Cardew researched Nigerian pottery traditions, touring the country and making extensive notes about methods, techniques, clay bodies, and mineral deposits for glazing. He chose a site in the Emirate of Abuja (now Suleja) for his Pottery Training Centre (PTC), a small-scale workshop intended to train boys and men to be potters by introducing them to modern techniques that would enable them to make wheel-thrown, glazed tableware (figs. 3, 4).

It is noteworthy that Cardew’s biographer, Tanya Harrod; scholar Lisa Bagley; and curator and scholar Susan Mullin Vogel have raised issues surrounding Cardew’s engagement in Nigeria. Bagley takes Cardew and his role to task, describing him as “at the intersection of Africa and the West in ceramics where he could act as a gatekeeper between African ceramists and Western audiences.”⁹ Vogel and Harrod remark on the distinct separation and lack of engagement between Cardew and academic art movements in Nigeria, notably that of the Zaria Art Society, which was active in the 1950s and 1960s. Its members, known as the Zaria Rebels, promoted “natural synthesis,” a concept conceived of and advocated by the group’s founder, Uche Okeke.¹⁰ Natural synthesis called for merging the best of Western and Nigerian traditions. However, in Vogel’s view, many of the artists associated with the Zaria viewed Abuja pottery as old-fashioned and ethnographic.¹¹ Harrod saw Cardew’s position as paradoxical—that of a modernist who disliked modernity and a colonial servant who despised the British Empire yet no doubt benefited from the privilege enabled by colonialism.¹²

Cardew first saw Ladi Kwali’s pots on a customary visit to the palace of the emir of Abuja, Alhaji Suleiman Barau, who had several of her pots in his personal collection.¹³ Though Cardew’s initial plan was for a male-only pottery enterprise, he reconsidered this take after encountering Kwali’s pottery. With the encouragement of the emir, he accepted Ladi Kwali as a trainee and the center’s first female potter in 1954.

At the time of its establishment in the 1950s and mainly through to the 1970s, the PTC gained a reputation in England and internationally due to Cardew’s influence as an established British studio potter. He organized exhibitions at the Berkeley Galleries in London in 1958, 1959, and 1962, which proved pivotal to the recognition of Kwali’s internationalism as Cardew’s connection and the interest garnered from his Abuja pottery project led the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) to acquire one of her waterpots and some of her thrown wares. The waterpot, the first work by Kwali to be institutionally collected, is on permanent display in the Timothy Sainsbury Gallery, which houses part of the V&A’s ceramics collection.

Kwali’s success opened the door to other Gbari women potters, including Halima Audu, who joined the PTC in 1960 (but tragically died the following year). Asibi Ido joined in 1962, followed by Kande Ushafa and Lami Toto, both of whom arrived a year later, in 1963, and were active at the center until around the late 1970s. These women continued the legacy of Kwali and Gbari hand-building after Ladi Kwali’s passing in 1984. The potters were accustomed to pit-fired pottery, but Cardew introduced them to wheel-thrown, high-temperature, kiln-fired and glazed stoneware, which previously was assigned only to male trainees. As Susan Mullin Vogel has noted, “Kiln firing was an exclusively male occupation, while open bonfire was practiced mainly by women and universally used in African traditions where it had a meager failure rate.” While the techniques used by women “have been characterized as technically simple,” Vogel points out that this method requires a hyper-refined combination of a specific clay body, fuel, and firing technique as well as certain atmospheric conditions—a formula derived from local experimentation mainly by generations of women, in other words, through regional and Indigenous know-how.¹⁴

Kwali created both hand-built vessels and thrown wares following Cardew’s method, but it was Cardew’s suggestion that she glaze her traditional Gbari-style waterpots with Chun or tenmoku high-temperature glazes (fig. 5), a finish never before used by Gbari potters.¹⁵ This hybridization transformed her pots from functional vessels to celebrated decorative art objects. As the scholar Emman Okunna observes: “This transition from tradition to modernity was a significant turning point in Ladi Kwali’s life and ceramic art practice. It marked an essential interface between the two domains in this iconic personality’s historical art experience. Ladi Kwali now saw herself in an entirely new domain, a testament to her adaptability and innovation.”¹⁶ Even so—and though she was the PTC’s star potter—Kwali earned less than her male counterparts, as educational qualifications determined wages, and she had received no formal education. This discrepancy reflected the wage structure imposed on the center by the Nigerian colonial government, which determined and enforced salary bands.¹⁷

Kwali’s adaptability, innovation, and agency, as Okunna observes, are evident in a portrait by Doig Simmons taken in 1959 (fig. 6). In Simmons’s black-and-white photograph, Ladi Kwali stands confidently in front of the main kiln, which can be seen at the center. She is dressed in a simple sleeveless sundress and her signature head tie. An unglazed terra-cotta waterpot sits at her feet, indicating that it is on its way to being glazed and then fired in the kiln behind her, a process that was, by then, her usual practice. We see a confident and aware maker standing proudly by her work, one of a series of waterpots adapted from Gbari pot-making tradition. Based on her working methods throughout her career, she clearly approached her “modern” stoneware ceramics not by sketching or inventing unique forms but rather through the creative processes she had learned in her village.

The portraits of Kwali discussed in this essay provide a lens for re-reading her agency as an astute, self-assured Gbari woman potter framed but not defined and contained by the colonial structure that brought about her international fame. As Marla C. Berns observes, although women are the primary producers of pottery in Africa, scholars have seldom attributed the creation of archaeologically recovered figurative ceramic sculptures to them. Moreover, the question of authorship regarding these esteemed ceramics has rarely been explored.¹⁸ It is crucial to consider Kwali’s identity as rooted in place and context and in who she was before and after her interactions with Cardew and his Abuja pottery project. In addressing the methodological challenges of confronting object histories, one must consider Kwali’s Gbari identity and agency, which are imbued in the objects she left behind. Additionally, Kwali’s pottery embodies a pivotal moment of transformation and hybridity, merging Indigenous Nigerian ceramic traditions with British studio pottery and modern Western techniques.

In 2007, Kwali and her pots were immortalized on the reverse side of the Nigerian 20-naira bank note. This national tribute goes to show how important the artist is in Nigeria. Yet, just the same, historical accounts of her artistic journey remain scarce in comparison to her stature. Little public information exists about Kwali’s later years, and no known recorded or printed interviews document her experiences in Suleja and beyond. Her presence within Nigerian Modernism remains paradoxical—both absent and present—primarily overlooked by intellectuals of the period, who were no doubt aware of her. Still, it is peculiar that she is not cited as an influence given the overlapping period. Kwali’s works resonate with concepts of natural synthesis put forward by members of the Zaria Art Society, calling for the merging of the best of Western and Nigerian traditions, forms, techniques, and artistic ideas into a hybrid art-making practice and conceptual framework. Ceramist and scholar Professor Ozioma Onuzulike has argued for recognition of Kwali and other workshop-trained Indigenous female potters who used natural synthesis to achieve works that have contributed to the discourse on African modernism.¹⁹ This marginalization was arguably shaped by Cardew’s deliberate detachment from the broader Nigerian artistic discourse and the fact that his pottery project upheld a colonial vision.

My recent trip to Kwali, the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), and Suleja in northern Nigeria to speak to Kwali’s surviving family members raised more questions than answers about how she is remembered. Only a few photographs of the artist and press clippings about her remain in her family archive (fig. 7). Public sculptures, street signs, and even a convention center named after her exist. However, aside from these visible civic and public markers, the most poignant reminders are the anecdotes. There are oral histories recounting stories of visitors from far and wide whom she welcomed into her home and of the critical support she provided to her family members during her lifetime. Additionally, Kwali’s descendants in Suleja hope that one day, her home will be transformed into a heritage site where visitors from around the world can once again come to learn about her(fig. 8). Kwali’s legacy—especially her waterpots—is rooted in everyday life. Easily recognizable as containers, carriers, and vessels that once simply held water, they nonetheless carry memories of an incredible potter whose work continues to transcend space and time. Ladi Dosei Kwali’s pots remain testaments to her personal story and its connection to town and country.

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Early press reviews of Niati’s exhibitions highlight the artist’s focus not only on gender and violence but also on sound. A review of a group exhibition at the Galerie M’hamed Issiakhem (March 8–April 10, 1987) in Algiers that included artworks by Niati alongside those by Hamida Chellali, Akila Mouhoubi, and Baya Mahieddine notes the artist’s focus on sound or, rather, its absence. “Women are at the heart of Houria Niati’s inquiry. The twelve pastel works on paper and the four paintings on canvas all take the woman as their main subject or, more precisely, the suffering of a woman,” the author observes before adding that the paintings make palpable the “forced silence” to which women have been subjected.² The article draws readers’ attention to the “silence” and “imprisonment” that are discernible in Niati’s depictions of women, many of whom are shown in inhospitable spaces populated by sharp-toothed hybrid creatures and floating masks—as in The Last Words Before the Long Voyage (fig. 1), an oil pastel from 1982. In other works from the same series, which is titled Delirium, women are shown confined in black rectangular and arch-shaped spaces or reclining next to a window and looking into the starry night. Some float through an abstract space in menacing proximity to serpents. The lack of interaction with other figures and their visible solitude submerges them in an overwhelming silence. Yet, while The Last Words Before the Long Voyage depicts a solitary figure surrounded by dangerous-looking animals, the title references the words spoken prior to embarking on a mysterious journey. In fact, sound in the form of poetry and music would become key aspects of Niati’s artistic practice, in effect “activating” the paintings.

The artist is perhaps best known for her series of paintings No to Torture (fig. 2), which she completed as an undergraduate at Croydon College of Art in the United Kingdom in 1982. Recently shown at Tate Britain in the exhibition Women in Revolt!: Art and Activism in the UK, 1970–1990 (November 8, 2023–April 7, 2024), this series is composed of a first painting depicting four women that is displayed alongside four other paintings, each of which focuses on one of the figures. Shackled at their ankles, their faces wounded by rapid incisions, the figures, the artist suggests, personify all women who have suffered colonial torture.³ The thick layers of paint and repetition of the figures across multiple canvases can be read as the artist’s persistent attempt to recover the tortured bodies without concealing the violence they were subjected to. Indeed, the dark smudges of paint that indicate their faces raise alarm about the aggression experienced by Algerian women during the war at the hands of French soldiers.⁴ No to Torture is a direct reference to two Orientalist paintings by Eugène Delacroix (French, 1798–1863), both of which are titled Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, from 1834 and 1849, respectively. Niati’s work retains Delacroix’s composition but replaces his soft, blended brushstrokes with dynamically applied paint and deep incisions—an expression of anger at colonial injustice and violence, Niati explains.⁵

The solitude of the individual women in each of the four canvases makes the silence of incarceration palpable. Even the group painting does not reveal signs of conversation between the women, whose faces are rendered in a highly abstract way, with the green figure’s head immobilized by a rectangular shape that resembles a birdcage. Coincidentally, Niati completed No to Torture only two years after the Algerian writer Assia Djebar published a collection of short stories titled Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1980). In her introduction, Djebar points to the formidable absence of sound in Delacroix’s artwork, arguing that the women abruptly stopped their conversation when the door opened and the painter walked in. “Sound has truly been severed,” Djebar writes, adding that “only in the fragments of ancient murmuring do I see how we must look for a restoration of the conversation between women, the very one that Delacroix froze in the painting.”⁶ It seems significant, then, that Niati often integrates sound in her paintings and installations, reciting her own poetry and singing Arab-Andalusian songs in front of her works in an attempt to complement the visual experience with a sonic one. While Tate only exhibited one of the paintings, and Niati did not perform in the gallery space, the display of No to Torture at the exhibition Forces of Change: Artists of the Arab World at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, in 1993 was accompanied by the artist’s recitation of her poem “Delirium,” which played from speakers. The poem began with the following words:

I offer to myself the world in a phantasmagorical 

Effort of critical transformation

What is it?

It is the outcome of a mysterious delirium

That contracts my fingers

On the multicolored pastels

Which trace the words and the shapes

That burst on the paper like a retarded fusion

Of pachydermic frustrations

Of transcendental relationships

The ramifications degenerate themselves

The stories are no longer listened to

The tales are not anymore tackled

In a warm and re-comforting impetus

We do not listen we look at

We accept with infected eyes

Swollen by the resignation and the demission

The lyrical evocation of stories and tales that have become nearly obsolete suggests their healing powers could cure the “infected eyes,” the “resignation,” and the “demission.” Recited alongside the No to Torture paintings, the poem commits to restoring the sound muted first by Delacroix and then by the French army when it incarcerated and tortured Algerian women. The detention is addressed in the poem, which mentions “doorless and openingless” walls of rooms from which there is no escape. The call to listen resonates loudly in “Delirium,” as if asking viewers to focus on and try to hear the muted voices of the women in the paintings. 

During the opening of Forces of Change, Niati also sang three songs a capella in front of the No to Torture paintings (fig. 3). All three works were composed by the medieval singer, poet, oud and lute player Ziryab Ibn Nafi, who lived in exile in Muslim Andalusia and whose songs Niati discovered while working at the Algerian Ministry of Youth and Culture from 1969–76. For Niati, Ziryab Ibn Nafi epitomizes the experience of migration. Born in Baghdad, where he was the caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd’s singer, he was forced into exile by his musical master El Mossili, who was jealous of his student’s increased success and power. Upon his arrival in Andalusia, he revolutionized medieval music, became the court musician for caliph Abd ar-Rahmān II, and gained fame as “the poet of Cordoba.” Widely considered to be the progenitor of Andalusian musical cultures in all their forms, his rich poetic-musical compositions have significantly shaped contemporary urban music in North Africa. When the Arabs lost Andalusia to the Spaniards in the late 15th century, they escaped to North Africa, where they continued their musical traditions. Arab-Andalusian music, then, is a cultural expression that survived exile and displacement. For Niati, it forms an eternal memory of migration, which she herself experienced upon leaving Algeria in the 1970s. By singing these songs in front of No to Torture, she articulated her own experience as a migrant Algerian woman, creating a shared sonic, cultural space in which women of different generations can coexist across time and space.

As seen with No to Torture, Niati often mobilizes poetry and music to “speak back” to Orientalist artworks. She shares this concern of confronting Orientalist visual representations with artists such as Brooklyn-based Bianca Abdi-Boragi, who is currently working on a series of 16 paintings in response to Delacroix’s The Women of Algiers in Their Apartment,⁷ and with Algiers-based Maya Benchikh El Fegoun (El Meya), whose recent work reimagines two paintings of Algerian women by Étienne Dinet (French, 1861–1929).⁸ Niati’s use of sound, however, is distinctive within this context. Her installation To Bring Water from the Fountain Has Nothing Romantic About It from 1991, is composed of three large pastel-colored paintings and three pottery vases depicting floating women’s silhouettes, masks, fish, snakes, and the moon. The title refers both to Algerian folk songs that praise the beauty of a girl who fetches water from the fountain and to the abundance of Orientalist paintings incorporating sensual aesthetics to conceal the physical effort of carrying water. By using thick outlines for a woman’s silhouette in one of the paintings and displaying the paintings next to heavy pottery vases, Niati emphasizes the strain on women’s bodies. The poem that plays through speakers as part of this installation touches on a recurring theme in Niati’s work—the lack of freedom and inability to break free due to either colonial oppression or patriarchal social structures—by evoking a “World where the explosion of Revolution” was “blocked up by the walls built by possessive hands.” Addressing “oppressed spirits,” the persona in the poem evocatively says, “The immobility is the repressed dream of the impossible escape to far horizons.” The poem then introduces the figure of a “deformed Orientalist” who “has traveled desperately searching for peace and newness,” a reference to the many Orientalist artists in Algeria who depicted the land and its people as exotic and erotic. In the lines preceding the introduction of the Orientalist, the poem reads:

Not thinking is to burst out laughing

Like a bomb

Obscured by the night

By the incredible misadventure

Of limited freedom

No matter what the silence 

In the illuminated darkness [. . .]

Who are you Women who submit

To sensual passion

In the shadowy houses

With half-opened windows

Looking into interior courtyards

Women fatal and mysterious 

Powerful in their innocence 

Out of the ordinary

Out of time 

Unraveling the Orientalist depiction of Algerian women as mysterious, sensual, and erotic, the poem directly addresses the women fetching water, piercing the layers of Orientalist representation that have fixed a romanticized view of them. The display of To Bring Water from the Fountain Has Nothing Romantic About It also includes the shapes of human hands and feet formed of sand on the gallery floor, evoking the actual bodies of the women whom Orientalist art turned into static images, as well as multiple reproductions of the same photograph showing women fetching water, suggesting the recurring labor. 

Integrating sound into her multimedia installations, Niati works against both colonial and local archetypes of Algerian women by merging their abstract painterly depictions with poems or songs. It is not insignificant that Niati frequently recalls marveling as a child at the stories and fables told to her and her sisters by their grandmother and that she firmly attributes the development of her own plastic language to them (fig. 4).⁹ 
The women in her artworks are always heavily abstracted, as if their bodies are at risk of dissolving into smudges of paint or oil pastel. Yet sound makes their physical presence felt: The poems often address the women directly, while the Arab-Andalusian songs locate them within a distinct cultural heritage. These songs also allow Niati to explore her own position as a migrant Algerian woman for whom sound is a way of forging a precarious relationship with the women she depicts, across space and time. Niati’s expressive way of working and the fact that she never corrects the initial marks made on the canvas suggest that her paintings are deeply performative, as if refusing to be fixed as static images that would delineate the terms under which women can be pictured. Free-floating forms and overlapping colors create vibrant spaces in which the sounds of women’s voices slowly emerge.

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Since the 1990s, the Hindi film industry has undergone several transformations in response to socioeconomic and political changes in India. This is particularly a result of how the Indian nation-state and its film industries have entered into the global market. Though popular Hindi cinema has always circulated internationally through informal, ad hoc networks, during most of the twentieth century what was then known as Bombay cinema catered mostly to local audiences in India where it was central to producing a national identity. However, changes to production, financing, exhibition practices, and aesthetics from the 1990s onwards turned Bombay cinema into a globalized cultural industry in a process that film historian Ashish Rajadhyaksha refers to as “Bollywoodization.”¹ To emphasize this transformation, today’s Hindi film industry is often referred to as “Bollywood” or, for films produced in the 2010s and later, “New Bollywood.” For many, New Bollywood likely conjures up images of song, dance, and melodramatic excess, but as a global cultural industry, New Bollywood addresses audiences across multiple different media and discourses that circulate on a variety of global, digital platforms, and in everyday, local visual culture. In this way, New Bollywood continues to play a crucial part in producing a commodified, national, cultural identity that can be easily consumed both nationally and globally. 

A notable aspect of New Bollywood cinema is that it has created a space for gender and sexual identities that have traditionally been absent from mainstream Bombay cinema. In Indian society, nonnormative sexual and gendered subjects have a long history of stigmatization, marginalization, and criminalization because they were framed as “morally degenerate” – a view that was in large part shaped by the colonial era origins of many laws in India’s penal code that are still in use today. Concurrently with the changes in the film industry, the Indian state’s entrance into the global market has led to a de-territorialization of the nation-state. As a result, geographical location is no longer sufficient to produce a coherent national cultural identity for the state’s subjects. For this reason, as feminist scholar Rupal Oza has argued, cultural expressions of gender and sexuality have become subject to increased surveillance in recent years because they serve as crucial sites for demarcating and policing normative, national values at a time of intensified global cultural flows.² In this context, New Bollywood’s foregrounding of nonnormative gender and sexual identities seems to be in direct contrast to culture’s role in policing gender and sexuality, yet attending to New Bollywood’s diverse local and global entanglements will illustrate how this global cultural industry sutures together heterogenous narratives of social inclusion, consumer citizenship, and national development.

In this essay, I examine the processes that allow New Bollywood to integrate seemingly subversive subjects and topics within a modern Indian cultural identity. For my analysis, I draw on examples from actor Ayushmann Khurrana’s filmography, his global brand as a star, and his participation in advertisements. Khurrana’s career largely overlaps with the rise of global, digital streaming platforms on which New Bollywood cinema can now be watched worldwide. Moreover, Khurrana’s filmography singularly highlights how New Bollywood has positioned itself as a nexus for grappling with anxieties about shifting gender and sexual identities in globalized India through social-message films. In an industry frequently critiqued for its nepotism, Ayushmann Khurrana is also notable for entering cinema as an outsider. In fact, much like the characters he plays, he hails from an ordinary middle-class family. As a result, Khurrana has developed an image, nationally and internationally, as a socially progressive man who at the same time is representative of an aspirational modern, middle-class subjectivity. 

By using Khurrana and his filmography as a case study, I map New Bollywood’s wider entanglements with commodity culture and argue that New Bollywood plays a key role in developing a globally and locally meaningful image of the modern, Indian nation-state as technologically, economically, and socially advanced. My analysis further illustrates that this is made possible by framing the citizen as a socially responsible individual who takes charge of their own and the state’s development through consumption, a category that can encompass historically marginalized sexual and gendered subjects provided they have the financial means to do so.

New Bollywood and the Social-Message Film

From the last decade (2010s) onward, New Bollywood has demonstrated a rising commitment to telling stories centering subjects and experiences that have previously been absent from mainstream cinema. No filmography demonstrates this more completely than Ayushmann Khurrana’s. Since his screen debut in 2012, Khurrana has become known for playing male characters who find themselves in unorthodox situations or who behave in nonnormative ways. His comedies highlight anxieties about shifting gender and sexual roles in India through themes such as sperm donation, infertility, erectile dysfunction, the performativity and fluidity of gender, geriatric pregnancy, premature balding, colorism, same-sex desire, and female health care. In Shubh Mangal Saavdhan (2017), a young man discovers that he has erectile dysfunction when he tries to have sex with his fiancée (fig. 1), whereas in Dream Girl (2019), Khurrana’s character vocally cross-dresses as a woman to work in a call center where his clients are mostly lonely men (fig. 2). Stories like these dramatize a meeting between imaginary, ordinary Indian subjects and new subjectivities and expressions of desire, gender, and sexuality. Narratively, the films negotiate these encounters within familiar vocabularies such as the family melodrama familiar from earlier Bombay cinema. In this way, New Bollywood allows audiences to understand historically marginalized subject-positions in relatable, humanizing terms, and it offers these subjects access to the imaginary of modern India through a shared cultural identity. 

Though topics pertaining to sexuality, gender, and desire are openly discussed in New Bollywood cinema, the social message in such conversations is framed as a challenge to conservative norms and normative gender identities that exist in ordinary, middle-class Indian families while offering a model for reconciliating these seemingly opposing values. For instance, Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan (2020) addresses a gay couple’s struggle to be accepted by their families. The narrative frames LGBTQ+ experiences and desires as unfamiliar to most ordinary Indians. In a scene that is also featured at the start of the trailer, the explicit reference to male, gay sexuality is paired with the incomprehension of a family member whose conception of same-sex desire is so diffuse that he has no words for it (he consistently refers to it as “yeh” or “this”). In this scene, the Anglophone term “gay” as a label for same-sex desire is introduced to both characters and audiences in a comedic way that counters the medicalized language of queer desire and the prohibition against public discussions of sex and sexuality (figs. 3–5). The story of Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan addresses anxieties about how queer subjects might pose a challenge to the institution of the heterosexual family and to normative male identities. The male patriarch no longer has the same authority as the younger, gay male subjects who wear earrings and flaunt their sexuality through public kissing and rainbow flags (fig. 6). But despite the novelty and the potential controversy of the topic, the narrative serves to illustrate how LGBTQ+ subjects can be integrated into the social world of the film. In fact, the plot treats “homophobia” as the “disease” that threatens modern Indian society (fig. 6). 

Generally, New Bollywood cinema has demonstrated a concern with social-justice issues. For instance, Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan is significant for being one of the first mainstream Hindi pictures with an explicit LGBTQ+ plot, and it was the first to be both produced and released after the decriminalization of homosexuality in India in 2018—a historical event that garnered extensive coverage in international newspapers and by global LGBTQ+ movements. This judgment is also cited directly, and repeatedly, in Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan’s promotional material and in its dialogue. In the last few decades, a country’s ability to guarantee its LGBTQ+ subjects equal citizen rights has become an important way to build a positive image as evidenced by the discourse around pinkwashing by nation-states and during mass-mediatized, global cultural events like the Olympics and Eurovision. Both the landmark ruling and its invocation in a globalized screen text serve to publicize modern India’s progressive sexual politics.

Globally, perceptions of national development are often connected with a state’s ability to guarantee vaguely defined “liberal values” and “human rights.” India’s claim to be a modern, well-developed state hinges on its ability to address the stigmatization attached to these taboos and desires while integrating historically marginalized subjects into the modern nation-state. In this context, New Bollywood’s capacity to fold diverse subjects and topics into its vision of modern India through publicity, narrative, and aesthetics plays a crucial part in shoring up India’s global image—even more so as New Bollywood cinema, now frequently financed by multinational companies, often becomes accessible to a broadly conceived liberal, cosmopolitan audience on digital platforms like Netflix, Amazon, and Disney+ after playing in multiplexes in malls in India.

The global significance of New Bollywood and its orientation toward social-justice narratives is further illustrated by considering the labor of its stars who are mobilized to perform cultural diplomacy at events in India and abroad. In 2023, Ayushmann Khurrana was recognized in the American news magazine TIME’s list of “100 Most Influential People” for the second time in less than five years. TIME’s rationale for including Khurrana stresses the actor’s history of playing characters that run counter to gendered stereotypes and his commitment to stories that push middle-class social mores by explicitly addressing societal taboos. Furthermore, the magazine highlights how Khurrana’s filmography is complemented by his off-screen social-justice work, such as his appointment by UNICEF India as a national ambassador to support children’s rights.³ Extending the brand of the star to the nation, Khurrana’s global persona thus underwrites the image of a socially progressive India.

New Bollywood and Commodity Culture

The emphasis on progressive social values, both the actor’s and as expressed within the films, discursively vanish New Bollywood’s entanglements in a commodity culture that nevertheless permeates both screen texts and wider visual culture. The setting of New Bollywood cinema is often deeply localized, with stories taking place in named suburbs of metropoles or bigger cities in northern India: Chandigarh, Haridwar, Bareilly, Allahabad, etc. The diverse geographical locations are supplemented by scenes in call centers, marketing offices, and glossy malls housing national and international brands that produce a cultural imaginary of a nation fully integrated into global financial and technological systems. The stories also illustrate the entanglement between local spaces and the global economy through snappy, intertextual dialogue that invokes imaginaries of a global India that is technologically, socially, and economically advanced. To take three examples from Khurrana’s filmography: in his debut film, Vicky Donor (2012), Khurrana’s character’s usefulness as a sperm donor is contextualized through his enjoyment of shopping, and on two separate occasions, he is stalked at a mall; in Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui (2021), Khurrana’s character encourages audiences to look up the rating of his gym on the search engine Just Dial; and in Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan, the main characters work in a mall, where they promote toothpaste. Service-oriented jobs and real, recognizable brands embedded in the storylines reconfigure commodity culture as a realist aesthetic that undergirds the social worlds of the characters in the film. 

The Bollywoodization of Bombay cinema into a global cultural industry in which identity is commodifiable has enabled an aesthetic shorthand for representing these new subjects in a way that risks flattening the radical political possibilities of New Bollywood’s new representational practices. Specifically, by attending to the emphasis on commodity culture in the films, we recognize a flattening effect as historically marginalized subjects and family patriarchs are addressed equally as middle-class subjects, united by their capacity to participate in commodity culture. Queer subjects move through spaces just as frictionlessly as non-queer subjects because access to malls, cafes, and white-collar jobs are all conditioned on the ability to buy access. The commodified approach to identity representation means that difference is simply something that is “named” rather than an occasion for coalitional, intersectional politics as feminist scholar activists like Sharmila Rege have called for.⁴ Taking Khurrana’s social-message filmography as an example highlights how New Bollywood’s additive approach to diversity is often only skin-deep.

Moreover, the emphasis on commodity and consumption in the cultural imaginary of New Bollywood extends from the cinematic screen into a broader, everyday visual culture in which New Bollywood’s brightest stars advertise consumer goods and—sometimes—developmental government campaigns. For instance, if you had visited India in the latter half of the 2010s, you might have been greeted in the airport by signs and billboards of actor Akshay Kumar advertising tiles by Kajaria. Notably, Kajaria’s tagline promises that tiles made from the soil of the land will build the country (“desh ki mitti se bani tiles se, desh ko banate hai”).⁵ Similarly, train stations and urban roadsides were covered with advertisements featuring then-newlywed actress Anushka Sharma and cricketer Virat Kohli promoting bridal wear and steel for building a “home.” Pictures of yet another acting couple, Ranveer Singh and Deepika Padukone, promised domestic bliss through choosing the right washing machine. Likewise, Khurrana is among these stars. Indeed, you might see his face plastered along the length of buses as he endorses the right shaving cream (fig. 7) or on buildings (along with actress Bhumi Pednekar) selling affordable fashion to the young and hip (fig. 8), and his ads for the smartphone brand realme (fig. 9) might be screened in the multiplex before the start of the film and during the intermission—a place only accessible by passing through a security check that bars those less likely to have money from entering. 

The cultural imaginary of New Bollywood cinema and its stars participates in a larger political project of modern India in which the middle-class subject is mobilized to perform citizenship through consumption. Whereas the cinema activates consumption in conjunction with social messages as a way to promise citizenship and a stake in the cultural imaginary for all who can afford it, in the ads, commodity culture equates individuated social and economic development with the prosperity of the nation. By thinking of New Bollywood as a global cultural industry that operates across screen texts and diverse local and global star-driven discourses that circulate in everyday spaces, we can understand how diverse vectors come together to produce a cultural imaginary in which new gender and sexual identities are integrated into the vision of the modern nation-state through a vocabulary of middle-class commodity culture. But so long as belonging is conditioned on flattening lived experience into a commodifiable identity, this acceptance is not only superficial but also risks foreclosing more radical political possibilities. 

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Bombay cinema looms large over media and cinema studies in India even though the history of the Bombay film industry is more recent than the history of film culture in the Subcontinent. The Bombay film industry as we know it today consolidated during the 1950s in the wake of the massive political and economic restructuring that followed the Partition of British India into India and Pakistan. Much before erstwhile Bombay became the prime filmmaking hub of independent India, film marketing, spectatorship, and criticism were already thriving practices in late colonial India (Fig. 1).

The rich history of pre-Independence film culture in India, however, remains understudied, and this has a lot to do with the difficulties of tracing non-textual and ephemeral popular-cultural forms through predominantly textual institutional archives. Recent film-history studies have drawn attention to the limitations of relying on sparse and badly preserved film archives, and scholars have instead begun to draw on a patchwork of sources, leaning particularly into the vast “parallel archives of paper” across vernacular languages to write deeper and more connected histories of print and cinema publics in India.¹ Adding to this web of scholarship, I examine three early twentieth-century Urdu film magazines published during the 1930s—The Film Review, Film Star, and Filmistan—as gateways into early film culture in India.² It was during the 1930s that film culture took off in earnest in the Subcontinent as the decade heralded the rise of the “talkies,” which introduced sound and, therefore, spoken language to Indian cinema (see Fig. 1). The decade thus marks a crucial moment of transition not only in film history but also in the trajectory of Urdu in twentieth-century India, which had by then become the subject of a reactionary language politics led by literary elites that was shrinking the boundaries of the Urdu public. Circulating in this sociopolitical context, film magazines bring into focus how Urdu was instrumental in cohering regionally diffused early film production into a shared and mutually legible film culture, and cinema, in turn, widened conceptions of the twentieth-century Urdu public by animating modes of viewing, listening, and speaking that blurred binaries of “high” and “low” culture in different ways.

Film Culture and the Urdu Public

The cover pages often offer the first clues about the audiences Urdu film magazines were addressing. The Film Review, established in 1930 in Calcutta, defined itself as the film magazine of mashriqi (eastern) India (Fig. 2), but this strong regional claim did not restrict the cinema public it was addressing. Publicity material across the magazines shows that the pre-Independence film-production business during the 1930s was scattered across a range of locations: Calcutta, Lahore, Bombay, and to some extent Delhi were the cities where noteworthy production companies were based (Fig. 3).

There is no indication of regional insularity in the way that the films were presented in Urdu magazines since, regardless of origin or language, they were framed as part of a wider market of “Hindustani” cinema—a collective imagination that overlapped with Urdu’s transregional spread as a lingua franca. Both the pseudonymous stylings of Filmistan’s editor as “Hindi” and the title dedication of the magazine evoke this transregional “Hindustani” imagination that is woven together by Urdu (Fig. 4).       

Moreover, the magazines themselves originated from regions just as disparate as the film industries they marketed—ranging from Calcutta (The Film Review and Film Star) to Lahore (Filmistan)—drawing attention to the expansive regional spread of the Urdu-speaking cinema-viewing publics being addressed. For instance, an advertisement in The Film Review alerting readers to the publication’s vast circulation network lists not only the Indian and foreign agencies but also the railway book stalls selling the magazine. These extended from Dhaka (Dacca) in the east which comprises present-day Bangladesh all the way up to Peshawar on the northwestern reaches of what is now Pakistan (Fig. 5).

The frequent and generous use of English across Urdu film magazines—with advertisements, film publicity material, and even cover pages of Urdu film magazines often appearing entirely in English—suggests a substantial transnational and multilingual audience. The tagline at the bottom of the page shown in Fig. 5 urging buyers to pick up a copy for their journey indicates that the magazines were largely ephemeral objects meant to be consumed as quick, on-the-go, pulpy pleasure reads. Finally, the ad’s emphasis on railway stalls as primary nodes of distribution and the explicit framing of consumers as travelers pointedly evokes an Urdu cinema public that was just as mobile and regionally porous as it was multilingual.

Advertisements targeting emerging middle-class interests were certainly not features unique to film-oriented magazines, as Urdu literary publications carried eclectic and visually evocative advertisements for new commodities and technologies that were visually keyed into the cosmopolitan character and consumerist impulses of Urdu periodical culture (Fig. 6).

Participating in the same consumer-aware print culture, Urdu film magazines displayed a much more direct and transparent understanding of their audience as consumers, and at the same time, films tended to be presented explicitly as commodities. This can, for example, be seen in a recurring ad template for Calcutta’s Krishna Film Company in The Film Review that extols the good quality of its film products to potential exhibitors, while also playfully evoking the mazah (pleasure) of a crowd mobbing the theater’s ticket window (Fig. 7). By evoking filmgoers as unruly masses, the ad also encapsulates thematic tensions in film-culture discourse, examined in the following section, which show that even as film magazines leaned into cinema as a trade and business, the way they imagined cinema-viewing publics was laden with both excitement and anxiety about public cultures derived from the bazaar, street, and quotidian life.

Gender, Urdu, and the Film Bazaar

In Filmistan’s 1932 afsana (story) issue, a regular opinion column by an anonymous critic vehemently derides filmmakers for including unnecessary bazaari (commercial songs) to ensure their films’ success.³ The column exemplifies how textual discourses on twentieth-century Urdu film magazines played into and perpetuated respectability politics by deriding the corrupting influences of the bazaar. Their visual culture, however, simultaneously undercuts this moralizing by magnifying the bazaar-associated sensibilities that had been absorbed into films. Relying heavily on cinema’s visuality, film magazines made generous use of glossy film stills, which is most evident in the great emphasis the publications put on being ba-tasveer (illustrated), that is, on including image supplements that usually carried half-tone photo blocks. The Film Review’s aforementioned full-page advertisement for its distribution agencies leads with the availability of half-tone photographic stills, establishing the inclusion of pictures as a key attraction and selling point for the magazine itself (see Fig. 5).

The most notable element of Urdu film magazines’ visual culture are the subjects of these images: female performers (dancers, singers, actresses, etc.) who are featured variously, in staged studio photographs, film stills, and illustrations (Figs. 8–10).

The illustrated cover of a 1931 issue of Filmistan’s special afsana issue (Fig. 8) depicts a provocatively dressed and sensuously postured woman as the literal conduit between literature and cinema. This imagery captures the sharply classed and gendered anxieties that films triggered by steadily blurring the boundaries between literary/“high” and popular/“low” cultures. The image underlines the contradictory impulses of Urdu print culture through the 1930s, when ideas of competitive nationalisms and social reformism awkwardly jostled for space with depictions of vanity, indulgence, leisure, and consumerism.

The ubiquity of feminine imagery attests that films made women, who in general had thus far been reduced to passive subjects of reformist and nationalist agendas, increasingly and dramatically more visible in the public sphere. Since the actresses of early Hindustani films usually came from courtesan lineages, they were socially marginalized, but cinema enabled them to craft something akin to professional identities.

O one from this humble earth, where is your destination?

Do you come from within four walls (home) or the market?

If you are honorable, then you are a beacon of beauty without question;

and if not, then get off the stage, for you are simply without shame.⁴

Apart from invoking the gendered private-versus-public divide that is typical of nineteenth century nationalist-reformist discourse, the poem specifically shows that the bazaar emerged as the lynchpin for anxieties about cinema in general and performing women in particular.

Conversely, conservative attitudes were also satirized in Urdu film magazines that gave voice to a range of opinions and commentary, including expressions of the new indulgences and pleasures that films afforded. A frequent satirical column titled “Gulabi Urdu” (Garbled Urdu) in The Film Review in 1931, penned anonymously under the moniker “Mulla Rumuzi,” plays with notions of adab (refinement) and sharafat (respectability) and mocks elite perceptions of cinema as the bawdy circus for the gawars (uncultured masses).⁵

Another article by an anonymous author in Filmistan expresses the exciting new modes of sociality that films were shaping through the trope of tafrih (enjoyment).⁶ Adopting the perspective of a young male flaneur enjoying the big city, the article describes the distinct pleasure of watching thrilling adventures in a cinema as part of a crowd. Cinema here is characterized as a form of tafrih for a rangeen pasand tabqa, or a colorful (leisure-loving) social group, a mildly derisive descriptor identifying the typical cinemagoer as a city slicker with money to burn. In addition to being a specifically urbane pastime, cinema-going is also cast by the article as a gendered activity that imagines the cinema theater as a space occupied exclusively by men.  

At the same time, the vision of film viewing as an avenue for male homosociality conjures tropes of early modern literary traditions like rekhti poetry, particularly the shahr ashob genre, which describes a young urbane dandy exploring the city and romancing young male paramours. Immersed in sensuality, rekhti poems express all manner of bodily and sensory pleasure with witty abandon, and they explicitly evoke homosexual desire.⁷ Such transgressive themes were derided by male literary elites whose views channeled Victorian ideals on gender and sexuality and sealed off Urdu literary genres into separate silos of “masculine” and “feminine.”⁸ Despite the mapping of these notions and attitudes onto early Hindustani cinema, cinema and film culture went a long way in allowing Urdu to transgress and transcend text-centered discourses in the twentieth century.

These examples show that Urdu film magazines, in both form and content, offer considerable insights that deepen the history of both film and Urdu in late colonial India and also highlight how they intersect and influence each other. The tensions in textual-visual discourses in Urdu film magazines reveal that cinema’s embrace of the bazaar in particular—as a space of social, cultural, linguistic, and gendered mixing and as a site of tafrih—animated uses, arenas, and publics for Urdu beyond the literary at a time when dominant discourses advocated for excluding entire vocabularies, registers, and indeed non-elite social worlds from the Urdu public. Early Urdu film magazines and other remnants of popular-culture ephemera therefore deserve to be analyzed more closely. Rather than simply folding its postcolonial history into totalizing narratives of national language politics and institutional erasures, Urdu film magazines have the potential to throw open discussions on the alternate lives of Urdu in twentieth-century India.

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In the mid-1980s, over the course of three years and across three continents, feminist artist Everlyn Nicodemus (born 1954, Kilimanjaro, Tanzania) gathered together women to discuss their everyday experiences. From these conversations, which took place in Skive, Denmark; Kilimanjaro, Tanzania; and Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, she produced a series of seventy-five paintings and related poems that she called “Woman in the World.”¹Organizing such dialogues as a prelude to the act of painting was a way for the artist to reject her early training in social anthropology at Stockholm University, where she chafed at the idea that researchers could be neutral observers of communities to which they do not belong. With the permission of participants, Nicodemus taped the events. But she did not use these recordings as tools to empirically document what was shared, as one might do in academic research. Rather, through careful, solitary listening, she began to translate the joy, pain, and mundanity of women’s lives into abstracted figurations. Together these works foregrounded something latent in her earlier compositions: a desire to make the relationship between self and non-self (or “other”) a pictorial and poetic strategy based on affinity instead of an anthropological problem rooted in difference.

By her own account, Nicodemus decided to study social anthropology after being “confronted with everyday racialist attitudes for the first time when migrating to Europe.”²She had moved to Sweden in 1973 after spending her formative years in the Kilimanjaro region. Already fluent in Kichagga, Kiswahili, and English, she picked up Swedish quickly and enrolled in Stockholm University in 1978. Anthropology, she thought at the time, “seemed to offer the intellectual means to better understand human behavior,” especially the baser forms she encountered while living abroad as a Black and African woman.³

Once she began her coursework, however, she discovered that the discipline lacked the possibilities she imagined. Social anthropology was a relatively new offering in Swedish academia, but like all anthropological fields, it had deep roots in ethnography, which had itself emerged from the systems and structures of colonialism. About a decade before Nicodemus arrived, the university attempted to loosen these ideological ties by changing the department’s name from “General and Comparative Ethnography” to “Social Anthropology” and by moving away from curricula designed around the Museum of Ethnography collections.⁴Despite these changes, which might suggest a shift from a collection-based approach to studying culture and society to a people-oriented one, Nicodemus grew increasingly uncomfortable with the role of anthropologist—even as she continued her studies.

Her frustrations prompted her turn to art-making. Nicodemus returned to Tanzania in 1979 to do fieldwork while also providing Kiswahili instruction to, in her words, “Scandinavian aid workers.”⁵While living in an international community of expatriates, she met some women who invited her to attend amateur drawing sessions.⁶Nicodemus abandoned the sessions after a few meetings to make time for more serious artistic pursuits, resolving to have her own solo exhibition as quickly as possible.⁷Nicodemus achieved her goal in 1980, when she debuted her paintings and poems in a one-woman show at the National Museum in Dar es Salaam, and preeminent Tanzanian modernist Sam Ntiro gave the opening remarks.⁸

Reflecting on this period of her life in an interview with Belgian curator Catherine de Zegher in 1992, Nicodemus spoke about why anthropology troubled her so deeply and how her emerging artistic practice resolved some of the issues she identified in the discipline’s methodologies: “Anthropology demanded that I look at human beings in a way that was foreign to me. I had to disassociate myself from the humans I was to study, to deal with them as objects.”⁹By contrast, the work she exhibited at the National Museum “was exactly the opposite of the objectifying approach. I exhibited myself as a subject, showing every part of myself, my problems, my hopes, my conflicts, my whole life.”¹⁰These themes included her experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, child-rearing, and romantic love.

The artist’s comments capture aspects of critiques that had emerged among anthropologists and other scholars in the 1980s about the discipline’s operating assumptions and its origins in the enterprise of colonialism.¹¹In brief, these assessments concern anthropology’s historical framework, in which cultures, and by extension peoples, are looked upon as hermetically contained entities that can be studied by supposedly outside, neutral observers and then interpreted for external audiences—often still located in the centers of Western empire. When Nicodemus says she turned herself into a “subject,” she does not mean the position of the anthropologist in relation to the ethnographic “other” as the field’s older conventions might have it; rather, she makes herself the center of the work, exploring her own vulnerabilities. An early example, After the Birth (1980) depicts a female figure curled on her side, a hand resting on—or covering—her face. A sleeping baby, the artist’s infant daughter, lies in front of her. A short poem accompanying the picture reveals the anxieties of a first-time mother both enthralled and overcome by her new responsibility.¹²

While Nicodemus has returned to her own biography throughout her career, she has increasingly framed her experiences vis-à-vis those of other women. Crucially, her paintings can be understood as situating those encounters as a series of mutual exchanges. For instance, she often describes one of her early works Two Black Candles (1983) in terms of a promise she made to acquire the bark cloth on which it is painted. Several years earlier, while pursuing her degree in anthropology, Nicodemus met an elderly woman living alone in one of the Bukoba districts near Lake Victoria.¹³They spoke Kiswahili, and eventually, the woman agreed to trade Nicodemus the bark cloth for some cotton cloth—on the condition that the artist burn two black candles.¹⁴

Why two black candles? Nicodemus does not know exactly, except perhaps for the fact that bark cloth is used in tradition-based burials.¹⁵In the region, the cloth is commonly associated with the Baganda people, whose kingdom in Uganda stretches to the southern border with Tanzania—an area near where this exchange took place.¹⁶Historically, the fabric was produced for various purposes, including for clothing and funeral wrappings. The latter usage, Nicodemus suspects, was the reason the woman had saved it.¹⁷(Incidentally, bark cloth is also the kind of cultural material that earlier generations of Western researchers would have collected for ethnographic museums, such as that in Stockholm.¹⁸)

More than anecdotal backstory, the exchange between the younger and elder women is integral to Two Black Candles. Its two female figures allegorize Nicodemus’s memory of the event—their tapered fingers dripping like wax, their bright white fingernails alight. The geometric and linear patterns of their robes flow into one another the closer they are to the ground, making the figures appear entwined. The soft texture of the bark cloth only heightens the effect. In that respect, the fabric has a dual function: It is the painting’s support, made plain by the untouched background. But it also peeks through the patterning, becoming an integral part of the represented clothes. 

A fluidity of line, in which bodies and body parts appear to meld into one another, marks Nicodemus’s work from this point forward. The resulting interpenetration of forms can be understood as a compositional device as much as a conceptual framework exploring the contours between self and other. Her painting technique is a prime example in this regard. Typically, the artist starts by drawing lines with charcoal, which she then goes over with a brush dipped into a tube of paint.¹⁹She lets the brush empty as she drags it across the surface so that the resulting line skips. Afterward, she paints flat fields of color just up to the edge of these boundaries. Nicodemus’s process leaves caesuras, letting the bark cloth—or, later, the canvas—break through her lines. These lines are not separations or hard boundaries but rather a means of entwining her figures so that one emerges from another. Indeed, Nicodemus’s caesuras might be seen less as negative spaces than as pauses that make room for other kinds of encounters between her subjects, herself among them.

The artist’s initial works for Woman in the World, a set of six paintings titled Tystnaden (The Silence, 1984), suggest that she continued to find conceptual utility in the idea of absence after developing it stylistically in Two Black Candles. The Tystnaden paintings emerged from a lull in the conversation among the participants in Skive, the first of the three gathering locations.²⁰Listening later to the tapes of the group discussion, Nicodemus began to paint on antique linen she had received as a gift from her mother-in-law.²¹Her pictures are not direct translations of the women’s stories, however. As her title suggests, the moments of quiet were just as important to her. The artist saw them as pregnant pauses, conveying what could not or did not need to be said.

Featuring monochromatic silhouettes of female forms, the six compositions that make up Tystnaden evoke but never fully disclose the tenor of the wordless exchanges. The artist describes the silence as having “passed through the conversation like a white thread,” a metaphor that explains the choice of paint color as much as it points to the fine weave of the textile that she left bare in the background.²²The outlines of the figures suggest an array of feelings, with some bodies folding in on themselves and others springing open in balletic leaps and arabesques penchées. Two women are solitary, but the remainder appear in pairs and groups. The swaths of white paint fuse them together so that, in several cases, it is difficult to make out the relationships among the parts. How many dancers, for example, are in the cluster with only seven limbs? Are the pairs of figures merging into one or splitting into two? What intimacies unite them? These questions are perhaps never meant to be answered, but they point to the gender-based affinities that the artist wanted to establish in her work at the time.²³Nicodemus further stresses this sense of commonality—in which one figure appears inextricable from another—in the corresponding poem “Women Silence.”²⁴According to her verse, having to hold secrets and, by extension, one’s tongue are universal undercurrents that unite women, connecting the womb, blood, and milk to the flow of rivers and oceans.

Although the formal resemblance of the figures underscores the shared moment of silence in the gathering, Nicodemus was also keenly aware that not all the women who contributed shared the same life experiences. After all, at every Woman in the World event, the participants came from different generations, class backgrounds, and professions. Several years later, the artist put a sharper point on the project she embarked on in Skive by acknowledging the limits of a feminism that does not account for the circumstances of race and geography:

Here, Nicodemus trenchantly borrows the language of colonial ethnography (“expedition,” “natives,” “study,” “collect”) and of anthropological analysis (“statistics,” “tables”) to reframe her own position and those of her participants. I want to draw a distinction, however, between the way in which she rhetorically presents herself in this passage and the model of the artist as ethnographer, to borrow a helpful formulation from Hal Foster, who used it to describe a slightly later set of practices from the 1990s.²⁶Although her statement can be read as a self-aware critique, anticipating the kind of “othering” that can happen when communities become the subject of an artist’s work, Nicodemus ultimately speaks of an equal interchange in which she too gives and not just collects.

If Nicodemus introduces the idea of reciprocity first through an ironic reversal of roles, in which the African researcher goes to the European indigenes, her framing was in part informed by something that transpired between 1984, when she painted Tystnaden, and 1986, when this statement was published for Woman in the World’s final iteration in Calcutta. “Who owns the knowledge of the Third World women?” Nicodemus inquires above. She also had posed this question as the title of an article she published earlier that year in Economic and Political Weekly, a social sciences journal based in Bombay (today Mumbai).²⁷Her account details the paternalistic attitudes and heavy-handed revisions she witnessed as a jury member and then editor for a planned volume of writings by African women sponsored by a Swedish government aid organization. What she describes, essentially, is the silencing of the contributing authors, whose texts were significantly shortened, reworked, and even retitled without their involvement. For Nicodemus, these interventions were particularly galling because the organization privileged its own agenda over the voices and stylistic choices of the writers—as well as undercut her purview as editor.

Literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s seminal “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” another text from the period, underscores the broader sense of urgency in Nicodemus’s question. Spivak first presented her ideas in 1983 at the conference “Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture: Limits, Frontiers, Boundaries,” before publishing them in 1988 and again, in revised form, in 1999.²⁸Beyond a general time frame and the complementary formulation of their titles, Nicodemus’s and Spivak’s bodies of work are both concerned with the ways in which the West constructs a notion of the non-Western female “other” through intertwined forms of discursive and economic control that happened first through colonialism and then through global capital. (The latter of the two was a channel for the aid workers and organizations with whom and which Nicodemus crossed paths.) To boil down Spivak’s argument for the purposes of my short essay, the question is less whether the subaltern woman has agency to speak than how institutional, political, and archival structures mute or misinterpret what is said.

Who choses silence, and who is subject to it? Nicodemus’s work proposes different answers over the course of Woman in the World. Notably, while the artist was back in Tanzania for the second iteration of the series in 1985, the problems with the anthology of African women’s writings were coming to a head.²⁹One of the ways that Nicodemus responded was to paint Silenced, a knot of black and brown forms punctuated with features like eyes and extremities. Emerging from this jumble of rounded shapes—heads, shoulders, elbows, knees—is a white hand covering the spot where a mouth should be. By the time she made Silenced, Nicodemus had fully developed the painting process I previously described, in which caesuras are left within and around the lines that form her compositions. In fact, barring Tystnaden, nearly all the works in Woman in the World feature some variation of this technique. That Tystnaden was the exception seems less an aberration than an acknowledgment that the pause, the absence, the silence demand critical acts of interpretation.

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“Seyni Awa Camara doesn’t belong to any artistic school,” wrote art critic Massamba Mbaye in 2016.¹ She resists any classification and has always considered herself a singular artist, whether in the context of her own country or in that of the international art scene (fig. 1). As Mbaye stresses, Seyni Awa Camara (Senegalese, born c. 1945) could easily have been excluded from the history of art built in the aftermath of independence in Senegal under Léopold Sédar Senghor’s patronage and with state support, when artists were trained at the Dakar “école des arts,” mostly as painters. Except for Younousse Seye (Senegalese, born 1940), no women participated in the exhibitions organized to promote national Senegalese art. Younousse Seye was the only woman to display in Dakar (solo exhibition, Théâtre Daniel Sorano, 1977), Algiers (Pan-African Festival, 1969), and Paris (Art sénégalais d’aujourd’hui, 1974). And contrary to most men, she did not benefit from academic training; she learned from her mother who worked as a batik dyer. Camara also inherited her skills from her mother, who was a potter in Casamance (Senegal). Both artists grounded their practices in family knowledge and later developed in more personal directions. Camara certainly gained more attention than Seye over time, especially outside of Senegal. At the turn of the 1990s, her bold statues were displayed in Paris (Magiciens de la terre, 1989), Las Palmas (Africa Hoy, Africa Now, 1992), and Venice (Biennale Arte 2001—Plateau dell’Umanità, 2001). They are now part of important collections such as the National Museum of Art (Oslo), the Theodore Monod Museum in Dakar (see fig. 4), and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain (Paris), as well as held in many private collections, some of which are in Senegal (Jom in Dakar and the Musée Khelcom in Saly Portudal). If her creations have stood the test of time, they have also crystallized many of the binary opposites that still structure the art world’s expectations, such as art and craft or the collective and the singular, or the caution deemed necessary by the West in validating any artistic process developed in the so-called peripheries. Looking at the history of global contemporary art from the perspective of Camara’s work and career reveals the ways in which globalization operates, especially regarding women artists from Africa.

Seyni Awa Camara’s figures are striking, and yet they are not meant to please or seduce. They stand free, strongly anchored by their feet, and are sometimes double-headed. With their large smiles, their visible teeth, and their bulging eyes, they often look provocatively happy. Their size varies from a few inches to several yards high, but they are always frontal and hieratic; they are sometimes covered with smaller figures, who cling to their torsos and legs (fig. 2).

When Camara started making these sculptures in her village in Bignona (Casamance, Senegal), people were scared; she could not show them publicly. Michèle Odeyé-Finzi recalls that when she met the artist in the early 1980s, Camara was selling utilitarian pots in the local market.² She was keeping her personal sculptures at her home outside the village in a special room that she had dedicated to them. There, statuettes ranging from maternity figures to zoomorphic ones, small frogs juxtaposed with large cats, trucks, or monkeys (fig. 3), covered the floor. They were made of clay of various shades depending on how they were fired, which is less the case today.

Mystery and rumor surrounded her activities and continue to do so: some wonder if she is still alive and if it is she or rather a sibling who is making the sculptures sold today. A triplet, she was about twelve years old when she disappeared into the forest with her two brothers. As the story goes, they stayed hidden for about four months and geniuses protected them and taught them how to model clay. When the three children finally returned to the village, one of them (Allassane) was carrying a sculpture that he said the forest geniuses had taught him to make. Camara told anthropologist Michèle Odeyé-Finzi that all three of them had been initiated into art by mystical forces—a story that perfectly fit the expectations of the West. It only needed to be relayed by the art world to become magical, which happened in Paris in 1989 at the Magiciens de la Terre (Magicians of the World) exhibition.

A lot has been said and written about Magiciens de la Terre as it betrayed many of the hopes it had raised of being the first truly inclusive and international exhibition. According to the Centre Pompidou, which mounted the show, one hundred artists from all over the world were represented in the French capital: fifty from the West and fifty from “the rest” or “non-Western countries.”³ This Eurocentric division was reinforced by the selection criteria: the works of artists from Asia, South America, and Africa were the result of religious, rural, or mystical practices, while those from Europe and the United States were technological, conceptual, and often self-reflexive in nature. Global modernisms were excluded as curator Jean-Hubert Martin feared they would be considered mere copies of Western styles.⁴ The “Picasso syndrome” theorized by Partha Mitter for Indian artists easily applies to any artist from the Global South, and instead of presenting artists who questioned modernism from different perspectives (such as those affiliated with the Dakar School or Laboratoire Agit’Art in Senegal), Martin and co-curator André Magnin chose artists whose work implicitly reenacts the opposition between the “primitive” and the “modern.” This dual approach revived the primitivistic fashion that took place in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the European avant-gardes drew inspiration from the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, hence contributing to their paradoxical integration into the Western canon.⁵ The “problem” with this exhibition was not the art or the artists, but rather the burden of representativity it imposed on the artists as their art was led to incarnate one part of the world in comparison or contrast with another.

Still unknown within the contemporary art scene, Camara’s statues were exhibited next to those of Louise Bourgeois (American, born France. 1911–2010), one of the few “great women artists” at the time, to quote art historian Linda Nochlin.⁶ Bourgeois served as symbolic validation for Camara, a gesture that was reiterated in 1996 when Bourgeois was invited to write about Camara for a book titled Contemporary Art of Africa: “I recognize her originality and a certain beauty. Now, beauty is a dangerous word because notions of ‘beauty’ are relative. So let me be very clear: the work gives me pleasure to look at. As one artist to the other, I respect, like and enjoy Camara.”⁷ Camara always considered herself an artist even though she lacked academic training (in the 1980s in Senegal, only 30 percent of girls went to school, and 93 percent of those attending art school were men⁸). “She enjoyed or missed the privilege of going to art school (a blessing in disguise),” continued Bourgeois. “But there need be no apologies for naïveté or technical shortcomings. Her genuinely expressive figures have a coherence in style.”⁹

Camara started making sculptures when she was six years old. She learned from her mother and used to hide zoomorphic figurines in the burning oven among the pots and amphoras her mother was making to be sold at the local market. At the age of fifteen, she was forced to marry a much older man and stopped creating. Though she was pregnant four times, she never gave birth; moreover, she fell seriously ill and had to undergo several operations. Like too many women in Senegal and around the world who are forced to marry at too early an age, Camara had to fight. She came back to art when she left her husband and found in sculpture a way to survive and rebuild herself. Her creations are testament to the power of a woman who not only persisted in a practice many considered strange or marginal, but also was able to make sense of it. She fashioned a unique style and, in the process, built herself a home and secured stable sustenance for her family.

Drawing inspiration from her surroundings, Camara has been prolific and consistent, often dedicating her efforts to pregnant figures and expressions of the maternal. In 1989, for instance, she showed a series of feminine statues covered with small smiling figures that seemed to be budding from them. The energy and power of this work results from accumulation, from the repetition of motifs that creates a tension and challenges any easy apprehension of their meaning. Faces suddenly appear on a belly or the knees, radiating like a sun. Camara’s anonymous characters wear jewelry, they have scarifications and elaborate hairstyles. They command our attention with their round eyes, but yet repel us with their silent, empty stares.

Camara believes these figures can heal both herself and others. Indeed, she once cured a couple who could not have children, helping them give birth to twins, as she recalls in Fatou Kandé Senghor’s film Giving Birth.¹⁰Healing takes time, as does the making of sculptures, which in Camara’s case, begins with the fetching of clay from the marigot (swamp) and is followed by the fine grinding of shellfish and the mixing of the two ingredients.

Once the modeling has been completed, the firing stage, which takes place in the open air of the concession yard, begins (fig. 5). As is always the case with ceramics, some pieces break or explode, while others endure the flames and come out just fine. Camara can count on the help of her family and is often shown surrounded by the young men (her second husband’s sons) who work for her, obeying her orders, preparing the pellets she progressively adds to her hollow figures (fig. 8). Though Camara trains those who assist her, she does not intend to pass down her style or her secrets, as she states in Kandé Senghor’s film. Her art is personal, unique; she believes she received a gift from God and that when she dies, her production should stop. 

Camara has been living from her art since the 1990s, but to her great regret, she sells mostly to foreigners. As she recounted in 2006: “People don’t know me in my own country. I survive thanks to foreigners’ orders. They buy my work and then they leave. My own country ignores me. They don’t know who I am.”¹¹ Fortunately, things have changed since then. The Théodore Monod African Art Museum organized a show of her work in 2018 and acquired some of her statues. The Dak’Art biennial included several of her ceramics in the national pavilion the same year, including her in a national survey of art, and her fame continues to grow within the Western art market. 

I wish to thank Francesco Biamonte, Bassam Chaïtou, Michèle Odeyé-Finzi, El Hadji Malick Ndiaye, and Fatou Kandé Senghor for the information and images they so generously shared with me for this essay. 

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My initial encounter with Marta Staņa (1913–1972) and her work in architecture occurred in 2002 when, as a young architecture journalist, I had the opportunity to interview Latvian-Australian architect Andrejs (Andrew) Andersons (born 1942), who hailed from Riga. During our conversation, Andersons highlighted Staņa’s remarkable work, which, to my surprise, was not widely known in contemporary architecture circles at that time.

Further investigation revealed that Staņa was better recognized among artists and designers, many of whom had been her students at the Riga Art and Design School and the Art Academy of Latvia. Andersons’s insights inspired me to delve deeper into Staņa’s story, prompting me to conduct interviews with her contemporaries who were still alive at the time. Additionally, I visited the Latvian Museum of Architecture, where a portion of her archive is housed

In the years that followed, I dedicated myself to research and had the privilege of curating an exhibition showcasing Staņa’s work. The exhibition Behind the Curtain. Architect Marta Staņa, held in 2010 at two venues in Riga—the Kim? Contemporary Art Centre and the Dailes Theatre—focused on her public buildings and architectural competition entries. However, there remained a folder containing newspaper clippings and notes about her smaller projects, including private homes, summer cottages, exhibition designs, illustrations for magazines, and even designs for gravestones. I put this folder aside to explore in the future. It is also essential to know that many of her design proposals, books, photographs, and personal belongings remain in the possession of individuals residing in the houses she designed. Some documents were lost during the restructuring of archives belonging to Soviet-era organizations, and some of the recollections of her contemporaries lack supporting documentary evidence. Nevertheless, thanks to the gradual digitization of museum collections, it has become possible to compile a relatively comprehensive list of her works.

For example, the small Tukums Museum preserves a furniture set consisting of a chair, a dining table, and a sideboard, along with a rug, wall art pieces, and metal candlesticks. This set was displayed in 1962 in the annual design exhibition held at the Latvian National Museum of Art, a highly popular show, the design of which Staņa also contributed to. Her innovative approach of presenting individual furniture pieces organized in sets, juxtaposed with traditional and contemporary crafts, ceramics, and textiles, was praised by her students and critics alike. This unique integration of modern furniture within the broader context of various art forms as well as architecture was a characteristic not only of the exhibitions she designed and co-curated but also of her own designs.

In 1963, she provided the design for an exhibition of work by her close friends and collaborators Erna Rubene (1910–1990), a respected master of traditional crafts, and Margarita Melnalksne (1909–1989), a ceramic artist. For their show, Staņa designed the general layout and furniture stands and created furniture pieces, such as tables and cabinets, to provide context for the entire exhibition.

Having designed the Dailes Theatre (1959–77) in Riga, the most celebrated public building in the mid-twentieth-century modernist style in Latvia, Staņa is one of a few Latvian architects whose main architectural work built during the Soviet occupation has retained its original shape and function. Among her other notable projects are a sleek cinema extension, innovative residential building typologies, schools, private residences, and summer cottages. Unfortunately, apart from the Dailes Theatre building, all of these structures have been modified to meet contemporary functional and energy efficiency requirements. While Staņa’s legacy encompasses a significant number of ambitious projects, ranging from high-rise office buildings and apartment blocks to schools and cultural venues, many of these exist solely as blueprints and architectural competition proposals.

After earning a diploma from the Jelgava Teachers Institute, Staņa initially pursued a career in teaching before enrolling in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Latvia in 1936. Upon graduating from the Faculty of Architecture in 1945, she was offered an assistant position under Professor Ernests Štālbergs. However, the tumultuous events of the time, including the repatriation of Baltic Germans, the initial Soviet occupation, subsequent deportations, the German occupation and persecution of Jews, and the subsequent emigration of Latvians to avoid the consequences of the Soviets’ return in 1945, greatly disrupted the established architecture school. The academic staff faced complete reconstitution, and Staņa became a member of the faculty during this process. She stood out as a talented young architect and a protégé of Štālbergs. Moreover, her previous teaching qualifications made her the sole professional educator among the other faculty graduates and other possible candidates for the job. Unfortunately, the academic community in the field of architecture, already weakened by the circumstances, suffered another blow when Staņa and her professor were dismissed from their positions at the University of Latvia during the academic purges of 1949–50. Immediately after that, the Faculty of Architecture was also closed, completely destroying the national school of architecture. Architecture was further taught at the Faculty of Building Construction at Riga Technical University.

During most of the 1950s, Staņa was engaged in a significant project for the remote fishermen’s kolkhoz, a newly made Soviet collective farm, in the coastal village of Skulte (Zvejniekciems), now part of Saulkrasti city. Her involvement included designing a master plan for the village, encompassing various facilities such as a workers’ club, a school, and a low-rise housing complex for teachers. The kolkhoz, which emerged from a prosperous fishermen’s cooperative that had been nationalized by the Soviets, possessed substantial resources and ambitions, enabling the commissioning of an entire village.

Initially, Staņa’s early proposals for the village adhered to the obligatory Stalinist architectural style prevalent at the time. However, in the mid-1950s, she embraced a newfound liberation inspired by the sweeping modernisation throughout the Soviet Union. This shift allowed her to explore innovative approaches in her designs. One noteworthy project that exemplified this progressive mindset was the school in Zvejniekciems. Developed immediately after the club, showcasing the canonical Stalinist architecture, the school design offered pioneering qualities, such as a horizontally arranged layout, with distinct volumes dedicated to each function. Abundant natural light flooded the learning spaces, creating an inviting environment. Furthermore, the school offered direct access to the surrounding nature, fostering a harmonious connection between the built environment and the outdoors.

Following her victory in the Dailes Theatre building competition in 1959, Marta Staņa joined the State Design Institute in 1960, where she dedicated herself to the ongoing design of the theatre until her final days. Her proposal with the main foyer’s horizontal volume situated on the second level remains unique within the context of Riga, where historical architecture predominantly prevails. By incorporating wide windows in foyers and designing a hall capable of accommodating 1,000 audience seats, Staņa introduced a fundamentally new architectural and theatrical experience opening it up to the city. Unfortunately, in line with the typical constraints of the Soviet economy, the construction of the theatre spanned 18 years due to changes and material shortages. However, despite modifications made throughout the design process, the architect’s original idea remained intact. The architecture of the theatre encompassed not only the building itself but also the surrounding public space, which underwent renovations in 2023 by MADE architects. This serves as a rare example of a building constructed during the Soviet era that has not only retained its original purpose but also complies with modern standards of public space and accessibility.

During her tenure at the institute, Staņa actively participated in numerous local and international design competitions, earning the admiration of colleagues for her ability to swiftly translate ideas into drawings, proving her talent for architecture and exceptional artistic skills. Among other notable works during her time at the institute were experimental apartment blocks characterized by spacious balconies, efficient utilization of space and natural light, and unconventional arrangements of facade panels. Additionally, outside of her official working hours, she passionately designed private homes and summer cottages for her colleagues and friends. These projects, created on limited budgets, exemplified Staņa’s remarkable ability to work harmoniously with available, low-quality materials, often repurposing leftover resources while maintaining a connection with nature.

For most of her projects, Staņa also provided interior design ideas, including furniture, lighting, and textiles. Staņa’s passion for illustration led her to collaborate with magazines, where together with her friend Erna Rubene she shared their expertise through illustrated advice on modern living. Her artistic skills and a keen eye for design were instrumental in providing practical and visually appealing suggestions to readers.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Staņa also dedicated herself to teaching, primarily within the interior design departments of Riga Design School and the Art Academy of Latvia. Although teaching may have held a lower status in terms of prestige, it was highly regarded by students who valued her unique guidance and expertise. Staņa’s educational method incorporated the concept of working with space and its objects as a cohesive ensemble, showcasing her approach to complex and rational thinking. She consistently encouraged her students to strive for excellence, offered constant encouragement and provided inspiration. Although she did not receiving any awards during her lifetime, her students, such as stage designer Andris Freibergs (1938–2022), who has mentored a new generation of internationally acclaimed stage designers, attest to the enduring effectiveness of her teaching methods and her talent as an educator: “I was so taken by her. I joined the interior design department of the Art Academy because Marta Staņa started teaching there.”¹ Many young designers had the opportunity to prove themselves by contributing to Staņa’s architectural projects, for example, in Zvejniekciems, where both the club and school buildings display graduation works, such as stained glass windows, ceramics and textiles, of Riga Art and Design School students.

Staņa died of cancer in 1972 and her career as an architect was relatively brief, lasting less than twenty years. Her work is characterized by a distinct clarity of vision, scope, and bold lines, skillfully incorporating people in motion and elements of nature. She viewed architecture, both in practice and education, as a unified approach to space, where architecture harmoniously interacts with the surrounding environment, interior spaces, and art objects within them. Staņa has not left a written theoretical legacy. Even in discussions held at the Latvian Association of Architects, she participated with simple, rational comments. She also helped her colleagues practically, even working in several teams during one competition. Staņa was not able to see the Dailes theatre building completed, nor was she able to live in the house and work in the studio she designed and started to build for herself by the Baltic Sea. Many of her ideas remained only as drawings. “I was born too soon. No one can build my ideas,”²she has said.

The assignment of roles to female architects was one of the many architectural histories explored during the 2019 exhibition A Room of One’s Own at the Estonian Architecture Museum³ in Tallinn. The curators raised questions about authorship in architectural collaborations and the distribution of awards in the field. In 1967, Staņa completed a mandatory biography questionnaire before her trip to former Czechoslovakia. She confirmed that it would be her first trip abroad and that she had never received awards for her work. While the Soviet labour market maintained equality between men and women, awards and participation in such trips were privileges reserved for male colleagues with prominent positions and Communist Party membership.

Regarding work placements, every architecture student was guaranteed a job at one of the State Design Institutes. However, not everyone managed to secure a position at the prestigious City division, which offered the opportunity to work on large public buildings. Women architects were often sent to remote locations, the countryside, or employed in other industries, such as road design. Female architects also played valuable roles in competitions, yet authorship and recognition frequently favoured male leaders. For instance, in 1963, an article⁴ in the magazine Māksla reported the participation of the Latvian team in the international competition for the monument in Playa Girón, Cuba. Similar to other competitions, a team of renowned professionals was formed, later working on Staņa’s idea. However, the accompanying photograph only featured her male companions. In that same year, one of the authors, Ivars Strautmanis, highlighted this competition as a personal achievement in the newspaper Rīgas Balss⁵, without mentioning other team members. Both articles in this case reflect the male perspective of the author, photographer, and editor. Such articles, omitting co-authors, reinforce the perception of authorship, perpetuating it in subsequent publications and conversations to this day. Additionally, it was common practice not to invite female team members to present projects on television or in documentaries, which were abundant to promote Soviet propaganda through culture. When women managed to appear on screen, they were often given the role of attractive background or exhibition visitors.

However, Staņa did not require an official title to earn recognition and praise from art and cultural circles. Her projects may have been unrealised or small in scale, budget, and impact on the official architectural agenda, nevertheless, her position on the periphery led her to work on cultural projects. These projects, though modest, have recently become accessible for examination thanks to the digitalization efforts of museums and archives. It has been a tremendous pleasure to discover footage of the interior she designed for the editorial office of Māksla magazine or blueprints of storage cabinets created for the Museum of Literature and Music while writing this article and adding two more works to her portfolio. In the Soviet Union, architects were not rewarded with prizes or bonuses for empowering the female community, designing museum cabinets, or experimenting with houses for private clients using leftover construction materials. Staņa’s architecture, indeed, exemplified empathy and embodied the paradigms of our time, transcending the boundaries of the 20th century.

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