WaterAid and award-winning Indian transmedia artist and activist Poulomi Basu have launched a dynamic new dystopian photo series, Sisters of the Moon, to show how a lack of clean water and toilets limits the power and potential of women and girls.
Poulomi Basu is an Indian transmedia artist, photographer and activist whose work advocating for the rights of women has received wide attention. Born and raised in India, Poulomi spent her formative years in Kolkata, taking early inspiration from the city’s cinematic history.
In 2020 she was awarded the prestigious Hood Medal by the Royal Photographic Society for her transmedia work, Blood Speaks, which put menstrual rights on the international agenda and resulted in a major policy change. She was shortlisted for the prestigious Deutsche Börse Prize in 2021 and has won multiple awards.
Poulomi has worked with WaterAid since 2014 on projects exploring the impact a lack of clean water and toilets has on girls. She has covered issues such as violence against women, period taboos and sanitation work. Poulomi collaborated with the charity on its To Be A Girl campaign which raised £2 million to build toilets and provide 130,000 girls with re-useable sanitary kits. In 2020, she was one of 10 visual artists commissioned by WaterAid to create work celebrating the 10th anniversary of water and sanitation being declared a human right by the UN.
The ecofeminist work, commissioned by the international charity WaterAid, explores women’s energy and strength and the importance of water and sanitation in helping them fulfil their potential as a force for change. Sisters of the Moon is inspired by the women and girls Poulomi has met through more than a decade of her previous work, including collaborative assignments with WaterAid, as well as her own experience of being raised in a patriarchal home in Kolkata where both her mother and grandmother were child brides.
The series explores issues that affect women and girls all over the world such as gender-related violence, menstrual taboos, and climate change, so rather than focus on a specific country, Poulomi chose to create a fictional dystopian world in the beautiful and barren landscape of Iceland. She placed herself in the photographs as a way of connecting her own struggles with those of women and girls from across the global south, using her body as a canvas to confront the politics of race, representation and environmental justice.
Speaking exclusively to Asian Voice, she said, “It's not easy for me to put my body on the front line of this campaign as a woman who's nearing her 40s because not some young pretty girl who like putting myself out there. I'm doing it in my middle age, so it's also about countering my own inhibitions, shames and vulnerabilities and not being scared to put it out there. We don't disappear as we get older.”
Sisters of the Moon is being released to support WaterAid’s Thirst for Knowledge appeal, which will bring clean water, decent toilets and good hygiene to homes and schools around the world, helping ensure girls have an equal chance to learn in dignity and safety. The UK Government will match public donations made by 15 February 2022 up to £2 million, helping bring these vital facilities to an additional 28,000 people and 30 schools in the Bardiya district of Nepal.
The 14 striking images include a bed submerged in water, inspired by women Poulomi met in Bangladesh who are living on the frontline of climate change and whose homes were lost and many flooded as a result of rising sea levels. Floating by the bed are water containers, highlighting how the climate crisis is a water crisis, with flooding contaminating water supplies and droughts drying them up.
Poulomi said, “Being a woman in a very exclusively male society, like India, I've always sort of looked for stories, where women are changing their roles in their own society when pushed to extreme situations, how they address those situations and break stereotypes, and I look for those underreported stories of women that not only highlight their struggles but also their resilience and their triumphs.”
One of the photos was inspired by a girl she met in the Himalayas while working in Nepal. She was barefoot, balancing three pots on her head and not going to school because she had to collect water so her brothers could go to school. Another photo was inspired by a blind woman Basu met in India with no access toilets, who had been gang-raped, and they'd use toilets, across the railway tracks in the darkness, besides wet and gone poor in a small slum.
Another artwork was inspired by a story of a girl who felt ashamed to leave the school chair where she was sitting because she didn't have enough sanitary pads, and she was still leaking and was terrified of staining and that there would be blood all over on the chair on the floor. “So that inspired the picture of me standing almost like a superhero drenched in blood and books,” Basu told us.
Basu’s idea was to make these women look powerful and magical, rather than victims of shame.
She also thinks that the problem with visual imagery is that if you constantly show poverty, it becomes poverty, tourism, and that is Slumdog Millionaire, you know, but the series here is not about poverty, tourism is showing women, it's showing women within a powerful way with an agency, but it's also highlighting the problems, in a way that is far more complex and nuanced than a simple picture of a girl standing near a broken pipe with water coming out know.
When asked about her opinion on what she’s observed over two decades of her work when it comes to changing status of women, Poulomi said, “I think it's very difficult because India is a deeply patriarchal and misogynistic society, and I think we're regressing given the current political scenario, we are in very dystopian times.
“I blame the patriarchy, which is a system that is not about men, you know, and even women are a part of it, where women cause as much harm to other women, the same way men help in gender equality movements. I feel until misogyny becomes a hate crime in India, this is going to go on, otherwise, it's very hard to see real changes.
“Don't be afraid not to be afraid to break ceilings. My advice is to raise your voices, because being silent has never helped anyone, and make art that crushes and breaks through those ceilings.”
Sisters of the Moon is supporting WaterAid’s Thirst for Knowledge Appeal, bringing clean water and decent toilets to communities around the world and helping ensure girls have an equal chance to learn in dignity and safety. www.wateraid.org/uk/sistersofthemoon
