Aakriti Chandervanshi’s Archival Photoseries Examines The Hidden Inner Selves Of Women

"All of the women I know love windows,

maybe we are all looking for an exit strategy, 

maybe we are all looking for a way out."

excerpt from the poem ‘Of windows and running away’ by Yamini Krishnan

Women have been often described or imagined as homes — a space where one feels safe and sound. But women, more often than not, get trapped in this domestic setting and its implications of gendered stereotypes. Using windows, soundly adorned by flowers, as a metaphor to look into women’s inner lives, multidisciplinary visual artist Aakriti Chandervanshi’s project ‘Gul-posh’ looks at rosy pictures of women looking outward as an escape from their assigned roles. Curated from the artist’s family archives of images made in and around homes — a space for women to dream and be themselves — these photographs capture women as they both express and camouflage themselves from their confined roles.

“Gul-posh came to be by sheer chance because I stumbled upon my late grandmother’s maternal family album,” Chandervanshi says. “Engaging with the images, I saw my grandmother in a very different light during her formidable years of staying at her family home in Lucknow with her sisters. Upon further inquiry, relatives would identify each sister or cousin and quantify their present in mere context of whom they were married to or how many kids they had. That’s all that was of their identity, but what I saw in the album told me a different story. The work mediates between these two extremes, how we perceive women in a domestic setting vs how they perceive themselves when one is not limiting them to one. I feel if we look at women as individuals, and not as assigned roles in a familial setting, it eliminates the burden, and gives space for new dreams and for one to be themselves.”

Keeping in tone with the images, Chandervanshi wanted to maintain an archival quality in the project. The metaphorical windows she uses to encapsulate and look into these images also came from garage sale hauls of a 17th century Victorian photo album she had acquired a few years ago. “Both the albums serendipitously came together,” she says.

Conservation plays a key role in Chandervanshi’s practice. Working with archival materials led her to understand that our past can inform the present, and that interpretation of the self can be informed through our heritage. “If one looks past the stereotypical roles beyond the masc-dominant lens, one can open narratives to filling blanks of our histories through introspection of the tangible and intangible heritage,” she says. “Conservation to me is not just of preserving, but of persevering”.

She is currently working on a zine in the space of mental health as a guide to validate millennial emotions and experiences. Long term, she is also working on another set of archives of her Great Aunt. “Since her passing, the only possession she left behind was a worn-out trunk soundly placed underneath her bed, which seemed to enclose a lifetime of memories and a reflection of a woman I barely knew,” she says. “I’m currently attempting to weave her story, a woman who is known to have defied all societal expectations in her time, a memoir of her being.”

Follow Aakriti Chandervanshi here.

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