The girl in the photograph holds two small eggs in her open palms — one whole, one broken. Her expression is quiet but unyielding, as if she understands more than she lets on. The image, by Gauri Gill, is my entry point into a unique exhibit in a working library, where books and artworks breathe side by side.

The gesture feels like an invitation into the stories in the show. That small, intimate act of holding, revealing, and resisting will stay with me long after I leave the exhibit, ‘We Sinful Women: The Library Project’ at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

“It is we sinful women who are not awed by the grandeur of those who wear gowns, who don’t sell our lives, who don’t bow our heads.” — Kishwar Naheed

Against a quiet wall at the start of the exhibit is a digital screen with a specially-recorded video of Kishwar Naheed reciting her iconic poem ‘Hum Gunahgaar Auratein’ (We Sinful Women) after which the exhibit is titled..Her words settle into the room like a quiet rebellion. Set in the midst of the artworks, the poem prepares you — an invocation of truth-telling, survival, and defiance.

Her voice — one that has survived censorship, dictatorship, and decades of feminist struggle — fills the space with an authority that feels both intimate and formidable. Her words become the spine of the exhibition, a reminder that these ‘sinful women’ are only sinful in the eyes of those who fear them.

We Sinful Women: The Library Project — curated by Salima Hashmi and Manmeet K. Walia, drawn from the private Taimur Hassan Collection — does not unfold like a traditional gallery show. Presented inside the SOAS Library, the choice is deliberate: knowledge and resistance, text and image, all speaking to each other in one living space.

During a guided walkabout recently, Walia led us through aisles lined with volumes on feminism, South Asia women’s movements, activism, migration, and political theory. As we pause between aisles 14 to 17 — sections dedicated to gender, sociology, and the politics of women’s lives — the resonance between the artworks and the shelves felt uncanny.

Students, researchers, alumni, and members of the wider London South Asian community stood together, listening as one piece after another revealed histories often muted or erased.

Landscape of women

One of the most striking works is Shahzia Sikander’s ‘Venus’s Fruit’ (2015). A seemingly ethereal woman hovers in blush tones, her form delicate yet confined. The lace-like covering gestures toward enclosure; the wing-like shape beneath her torso evokes both flight and shroud; her legs taper into trailing strands — roots, memories, burdens. The hybrid body holds the tension between fragility and resistance, suspended in the liminal space where identity, nation, and memory collide.

Nearby, Nalini Malani’s haunting mixed-media piece weaves lines from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins… Shantih Shantih Shantih.’ Tiny spectral figures drift across washes of pink and sepia. It is a work that collapses personal and political grief, showing how colonial violence, gendered trauma, and fragmented histories settle into the body.

Across it, Zarina Hashmi’s quiet but piercing works speak through minimal lines and borders — maps, memories, and the architecture of loss distilled into stark geometry. Farida Batool’s lenticular images evoke the disorientation of crossing militarised borders, each movement altering what is revealed and what remains hidden. Bani Abidi’s photos — hands in motion, signalling, resisting — become an entire vocabulary of dissent. Together, these works expand the emotional and political universe of Naheed’s poem.

Art meets activism

The exhibition also sits in conversation with an earlier project co-curated by Hashmi and Walia, exploring the creative and political possibilities of South Asia through art and film. That curatorial lineage expands the meaning of this library project, situating it within a broader feminist and regional tradition of asking uncomfortable questions.

Later, in the Djam Lecture Theatre, journalist and peace activist Beena Sarwar, cultural historian Mira Hashmi, curator Manmeet K. Walia, and SOAS scholar Dr Sanjukta Ghosh extended these conversations into the realm of media, censorship, and peacebuilding.

Sarwar spoke about the Southasia Peace Action Network (Sapan), its founding charter, and its social media ethics pledge. She reminded us that digital spaces, as Nobel laureate Maria Ressa notes, often function as ‘astroturf’ — an illusion of public sentiment rather than its reflection. Responsible storytelling remains essential, especially when documenting gendered and political violence.

As a journalist and PhD researcher studying misogyny as political radicalisation, the exhibition struck a deeper chord for me. None of these works exists in abstraction; they are testimonies. They speak of wounds carried in silence, of lives shaped by borders and patriarchies, of women who resist being written out of history. They remind us that political violence is not always loud. Sometimes it is quiet, domestic, intimate — and art becomes the only space where its echoes can still be heard.

‘We Sinful Women: The Library Project’ runs until 7 December 2025 at SOAS Library. It is both an exhibition and a quiet uprising — a gathering of voices, memories, and refusals. It asks us not only to look, but to listen. To witness. To remember.

Because, as Kishwar Naheed insists, ‘it is we sinful women… who do not bow our heads.’

(The author is a journalist, author, and PhD researcher at SOAS, University of London. Her doctoral research examines misogyny as political radicalisation across South Asia and diaspora contexts, with a focus on digital hate and honour-based violence. By special arrangement with Sapan)