Curated by Linsey Young at Vadehra Art Gallery, Women on the Edge of Time links nine South Asian artists across India and the UK. Inspired by Marge Piercy's 1976 novel, the exhibition moves from institutional isolation to myth and shared inheritance.
In 1976, American writer Marge Piercy published Woman on the Edge of Time, a novel that centred around Connie Ramos, a Mexican-American woman locked away in a psychiatric ward against her will. Subjected to invasive medical experiments and stripped of control over her own physical self, Connie’s distress and anger were labeled as pathology by an institution that refused to acknowledge how poverty and structural inequality shaped her life. Yet within that state of confinement, Connie makes mental contact with a figure from the future, catching glimpses of an egalitarian society built on collective labour, shared land, and a categorical rejection of patriarchal control. Piercy set up a conversation between the immediate physical violence of control and the imaginative freedom required to build something better.
That tension forms the spine of 'Women on the Edge of Time', a group exhibition curated by Linsey Young at Vadehra Art Gallery’s D-53 Defence Colony space in New Delhi. Gathering work from nine South Asian artists — Anju Dodiya, Arpita Singh, Ashfika Rahman, Gurminder Sikand, Jai Chuhan, Jasleen Kaur, Leela Mukherjee, Mumtaz Karimjee, and Sheba Chhachhi — the show spans multiple generations, geographies, and media. It brings together five practitioners who built their careers within India and four who operate from the United Kingdom, creating a dialogue that stretches across borders and historical moments.
The exhibition lets visitors walk through a deliberate spatial progression and the narrative begins in spaces of clinical isolation and institutional observation, where bodies are catalogued, treated, or rendered invisible. From there, the works discloses out toward the street, assembling into collective political testimony, before eventually turning toward land, myth, and generational inheritance. The exhibition intentionally resists settling into a single artistic technique, housing installation, painting, drawing, and photography under one roof. This fluidity mirrors the source novel’s refusal to stay locked in a single era, letting historical grievances collide with contemporary anxieties.
The artists brought together here approach the question of bodily sovereignty from distinct cultural vantage points. Sheba Chhachhi’s long-standing engagement with feminist movements and documentary interventions operates in tandem with the expressive, narrative-dense canvases of Arpita Singh, whose work has long chronicled the vulnerabilities of daily female life within domestic and public environments. Anju Dodiya brings introspective, self-reflective painterly narratives that interrogate physical endurance and psychological states, while the late Leela Mukherjee’s sculptural sensibilities oils the wheels for a grounding sense of material history.
Alongside these iconic figures, contemporary practitioners push the spatial and political boundaries of the conversation. Jasleen Kaur’s multidisciplinary work inspects cultural memory, class, and colonial legacies within the South Asian diaspora in Britain, using everyday objects and sounds to reconstruct lost histories. Ashfika Rahman uses photography and community-focused research to confront systemic violence, state oppression, and marginalised identities along borderlands. Jai Chuhan’s paintings present isolated, brooding figures that explore displacement and emotional landscapes, complemented by the observational perspectives in Mumtaz Karimjee’s photographic work and Gurminder Sikand’s art practice.
By pairing foundational figures with contemporary practitioners across the UK and India, the exhibition traces feminism as an active, evolving lineage passed down across generations.The works interrogate what artists working today owe to the practitioners who pushed open doors decades ago, and what kind of future can be constructed from the specific tools, stories, and struggles inherited from them.
The physical layout at D-53 Defence Colony consciously echoes this spirit of passage. By guiding visitors away from institutional confines toward broader horizons of land and shared memory, the show emphasises that liberation is an active, ongoing construction. Piercy’s original vision focused on imagining a world where the structural violence that put Connie in that hospital room became impossible.
Women on the Edge of Time remains on view at Vadehra Art Gallery’s D-53 Defence Colony space till the 18th of September 2026. Ultimately, the show asserts that memory and artistic output function as survival tools, turning historical struggles into actionable blueprints for generations to come.
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