Among the local trains in Mumbai, women’s compartment is a contradiction. It promises protection through isolation, comfort through control. This is the place where strangers sit shoulder to shoulder, share the dishes before the names, or are sighing instead of stories. This is the basis of calm solidarity Ladies compartmentA group exhibition by Vidhi (India), now in Gallery Melic Bilir in Hamburg, Germany.
Trendry
Photo Credit: Assisted Fadnavis
Gender train coach beyond
The show brings six Indian female artists – Assisted Fadnavis, Avni Rai, Darshanika Singh, Kirthana Kunnath, Krithika Shriram, and Shaheen Peer together – each is reflected on the penis, space and flexibility. Inherent in the hyperlokal image of Mumbai’s gender-different train compartments, the exhibition is a big question in the exhibition that how women run through the world and blank places-physical, emotional, cultural-which define those movements.
Sahil Arora, the curator and founder of the method, says, “Most Europeans spoke that they had never faced the idea of train coaches.” “But this does not mean that women in Europe are completely safe. The cans become a door to talk about what security looks, who achieves access, and at what cost.” The show, India Week Hamburg is part of 2025, is the first exhibition of the method in Germany.
Sandra as a Hindu goddess
Photo Credit: Kerthana Kunnath
Open for questions
While the basis of the exhibition comes out of a recognizable Indian experience, its intention is not parochial. These are not the tasks that portray only a subject – they think through it, press against it, and oppose clean conclusions. Each artist speaks in his vocabulary of image, pigment, gestures or breath.
Take a video piece of Darshika Singh, In the same viewBuilt around the rhythm and recurrence, it quietly questions that women’s labor – especially physical, careful work – is invisible by its very frequency. Singh says, “There is a lot about the society about the productivity of women, how our gestures are made natural.” “But repetition can also be seen afresh. In a way the order preserves; the other breaks it.”
The idea that disintegration does not always need to walk vigorously through the show. In a striking series of extinct self-paintings, Critica Sriram used a rose-patal pigment, which she calls the “a missing image” of the Dalit female body. The work deliberately gets away from the spectacle of caste violence. “It’s not about Gore,” she says. “It comes from someone who sees its history with the agency.”
In my mother’s sari
Photo Credit: Shaheen Peer
Sriram’s job invites the audience to ask the question of how we remember the pain – and what beauty dilutes it or distinguishes it. “I don’t think beauty softens criticism,” she says. “If it exists, it reflects my view, I have the right to represent my own body.”
Photographer Shaheen Peer takes a similar route of cool disregard. Her faceless self-picture, wrapped in cloth, speak formless, not identified. She says, “We are often more worried about who is in the image than the image.” Except for the face, she replaces the gaze – towards memory, material, asana, appearance.
Emerald
Photo Credit: Avni Rai
Size by artists
These subtle but deliberate gestures gather in the exhibition. The decade of daily life’s Fadnavis within Mumbai trains creates a darling of solitude and create an ethnology of solitude. Pictures of Punjabi women’s opinion documentation of land, sorrow and the weight of the related. She has a blurred quality for her, which makes this subject – a young girl of about 10 – a figure of aspirations as she writes, stands up, and lies on the bed of flowers, looking sideways. Pictures of Kunnath of Indian women bodybuilders destabilize the idea of strength as masculinity, and reduce femininity.
For Arora, the curatorial process was artist-first. “It was not about showing a curatorial statement,” he says. “Artists shaped the show.” He constantly accepts gender imbalance in the world of art-why the “women-keeks” shows still exist. “If the representation was really balanced, these categories would not be necessary,” they say.
Kuwalai
Photo Credit: Kritika Shriram
Beyond gallery
The Ladies compartment has long served as a museum and metaphor in Indian cultural works. In the novel Ladies coupe (2001), Anita Nair calculated his hero with femininity inside a train coach filled with fellow female passengers – each shared stories that highlight domesticism, duty and desire. Photojournalist shuchi Kapoor’s Rush hour sister The commuting of Mumbai in the moments of tiredness, care and Umaradari holds the black and white paintings of women. Feminist zain zero tolerance The Bombay Underground (2007) visually mapped the compartment in the form of both sanctuary and monitoring space, protesting with anonymous admirers. In the documentary of Nishtha Jain, City of photosThe train appears briefly but meaningful, a path between self-imaging and social invisibility. In the poem of Meena Kandasamy Ms. extremism (2010) In the solitude of the echoes, it is often felt in public areas with gender, while the words spoken by Nieati Patel Confession A row of everyday intimacy in transit uses a piece of overdard speech to store caste-comprehensive mapping.
#TraIndaries
Photo Credit: Assisted Fadnavis
No grand claim
The show does not offer any easy takeaets. There is no announcement of revolution, there is no grand claim of feminist victory. instead, Ladies compartment Often ignored is ignored – the gesture focuses on the calm strength of routine and repetition. It asks: When does a limit protect, and when is it limited?
In Mumbai, women in women’s boxes stop their train, silence, and they know the names or businesses before they take their train. Perhaps this real offering is here: a glimpse of how women learn to share space – unevenly, gently, strategically – and types of care, strength, and cameradari types.
The exhibition is in Gallery Melic Bilir in Hamburg, Germany till 20 July.
Essayists and teachers write on design and culture.
Published – July 18, 2025 08:08 am IST
