AT A GLANCE
Jasmeen Patheja
Area of Practice:
OVERVIEW
Jasmeen Patheja ( born 1979, Kolkata) is an award-winning, Artist in Public Service, committed to ending violence against women, girls, and all persons. Patheja builds ideas and methodologies, for collective feminist action, mobilising for the right to be free from fear and defenceless. ” An idea has no significance or meaning, unless someone makes it their own.” Patheja’s practice is at the intersection of art and movement building.
Patheja founded Blank Noise in 2003, in response to the silence surrounding street harassment in India and globally. Blank Noise began as her final year diploma project at Srishti Insitute of Art, Design and Technology.
Blank Noise mobilises everyday citizens to become ‘Action Sheroes/Heroes/Theyroes’ and take agency in ending gender-based violence. It works to affect public consciousness, towards taking collective responsibility of the issue. Patheja’s practice is based on listening to the lived experiences of survivors of sexual assault. Over the past two decades, she has collaborated with numerous allies, communities, institutions, and stakeholders across different geographies and social contexts to end gender-based violence. Her approach has grown from addressing street harassment to confronting victim blame, as experienced across spaces of violence from the home, street, and campus. Patheja works with themes including fear, memory, imagination, shame, desire, belonging, empathy, defence and defencelessness.
Select projects at Blank Noise include the I Never Ask For It Mission (2004-ongoing), Meet To Sleep (2015-ongoing) and Talk To Me (2012- ongoing). Her art practice spans tactical media including performance, community building and facilitation, installation, sound, video, and photography.
Patheja is a TED speaker. She is also a TED and an Ashoka Fellow. In 2023, Patheja was awarded the CARE Arts For Gender Equality Fellowship with the Rockefeller Foundation. Notable awards and recognition include the prestigious Visible Award for the project I Never Ask For It/Meet To Sleep. Patheja received the International Award For Public Art for the project Talk To Me (2015). In 2019, Patheja was awarded the Jane Lombard Fellowship by the Vera List Center For Art and Politics, New York. BBC listed her as one of the 12 artists changing the world (2019). Patheja has been an artist in residence, in institutions including Akademie Schloss Solitude, Germany, and the Rockefeller Foundation at Bellagio. She is an artist in residence at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design, and Technology.
Noteworthy press mentions include BBC, The Hindu, Times of India, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, Deccan Herald, Now This and The Guardian.
Patheja and her grandmother Indri are collaborators. Together they have been working on a series of photo performances to address desire, ageing and agency.
Patheja is based in Bangalore.
EDUCATION
School : La Martiniere For Girls, Kolkata(1998) College: Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology (2003) .
WORK EXPERIENCE
Patheja is a public speaker :
Select talks include TED talk at TED Talks India Nayi Soch, hosted by Shahrukh Khan in partnership with Star Plus. The talk was in Hindi. https://www.ted.com/talks/jasmeen_patheja_everyone_deserves_to_be_safe?language=en
Patheja has guest lectured at institutes including Grinnell College, Iowa. Public talks at universities include Mc Gill University, Concordia University, University of Auckland. She has led workshops and talks at Tokyo Keizai University.
Feminist Mentor:
Patheja has been a feminist mentor towards building feminist leadership with the Global Fund For Women and CREA’s South Asian Young Women’s Leadership and Mentorship Programme.
In this role, Patheja mentored a cohort of young women leaders across the country with an emphasis on art and movement building. The project was led by CREA and Global Fund For Women.
Workshops and Facilitation:
Patheja has worked with the I Never Ask For It Mission, Blank Noise, by designing and facilitating workshops to tackle fear, warnings and victim blame. She has worked with numerous community-based organisations and college campuses towards the same.
Board Member:
Patheja has served on the board of Fem Tech Net.
INTEREST AREAS
The future of ageing, Art and Feminist Movement building, Designing for Dissent, Belonging, Campus of Belonging, Socially Engaged Art Practice, Defencelessness as a birthright, Ending gender-based violence, ending Victim blaming, Feminist Leadership, Art and Public Service, Solidarity building, Art and Public Service.
CURRENT PRACTICE AT SRISHTI
Lab : Campus of Belonging – Blank Noise X SMI
TEACHING PORTFOLIO
All of Patheja’s teaching is towards creating a community of Action Sheroes/ Theyroes/ Heroes on Campus, in Yelahanka and or in the city. Classes taught by Patheja offer learnings on campaign building, movement building, the role of listening, ethics and community work, self-confrontation – the role of self in social change, and community mobilisation.
2024:
Jasmeen taught a master class, sharing her grandmother’ Indri’s collaboration. The master class delved into themes of ageing, desire and agency. The class was for 8th semester students working on the project, Kal Ka Pal.
Patheja taught a master class on being an Action Shero at Blank Noise, to students working on game design.
Campus of Belonging 2023
Patheja taught a class to initiate the Campus of Belonging. The class was led by questions and inquiries, on the relationships of identity, safety, equity and belonging. The class was taught over two months.
I Never Ask For It: Over the years, Patheja has offered multiple courses to examine fear, the politics of fear and victim blaming. The classroom becomes a community of Action Sheroes/ Heroes/ Theyroes; thereby taking responsibility for the issue. Students plotted the I Never Ask For It testimonial boards on campus. Classroom consciousness raising led to public-facing interventions such as ‘Talk To Me’ and The Hahaha Sangha.
Words of desire and dissent: Students worked with Patheja and Blank Noise, Meet To Sleep to
listen in and list recurring shared vocabularies of the experience of building the movement, Meet To Sleep.
Hahaha Sangha: A community-based project where students and women residents of Yelahanka met every day at a neighbourhood park, to laugh. The project investigated the relationship between initiating intergenerational friendships, occupying through laughter, and fostering belonging, thereby dissolving fear. The class formed the Yelahanka Action Sheroes/ Heroes/ Theyroes.
In 2009, Patheja with Blank Noise, worked with students at Srishti to create a community of Action Sheroes/ Heroes/ Theyroes. This was on the invitation of PSP led by Geetu Sachdev.
The course led the students to make their story of fear visible through methodologies such as the Action Hero Game. Students also worked on signage design with the invitation to design new behaviours for public spaces and or to question it.
CREATIVE PRACTICE & OUTREACH
Select Exhibitions:
2022-2023 Blank Noise installation at Khoj International Art Association, New Delhi. Group show titled Threading the Horizons. The show included the I Never Ask For It garment installation and sound testimonials, Reporting To Remember, Blank Noise.
https://khojstudios.org/project/towards-feminist-futures/
2019 Ford Foundation, New York, inaugural show.
Group show curated by Jaishri Abichandani and Natasha Becker.
https://www.fordfoundation.org/news-and-stories/news-and-press/news/ford-foundation-announces-opening-of-its-art-gallery-focused-on-social-justice-offers-details-of-inaugural-exhibitions/
2017 Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, Australia.
Project Indri, is an ongoing collaboration between Jasmeen Patheja and her grandmother, Inderjit Kaur. Work shared at CCP is Dr. Indri Pickles, a mango pickle-making project.
https://ccp.org.au/exhibition/inderjit-kaur-and-jasmeen-patheja-indri-pickle-lab-mango-pickle/
2017 Group Exhibit, Archival Alchemy, at Abrons Art Center, New York, with SAWCC ( South Asian Women’s Creative Collective). Curator Saisha Grayson. Blank Noise shares the I Never Ask For It project at the exhibit, inviting allies, and fellow Action Sheroes to co-create the mission.
http://www.sawcc.org/archival-alchemy-sawccs-20th-anniversary-exhibition/
2016 Indri Pickle Lab, video installation, Elizabeth Foundation For The Arts, New York, USA. https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/184924/once-more-with-feeling/
2016 I Never Ask For It Mission at the Max Mueller Bhavan, Goethe Institute Bangalore, a multi-media exhibition including the I Never Ask For It garment installation.
2009 2-channel video installation, Moments of a Long Pause, based on interviews with men and women on the streets of five Indian cities. The video simulates a conversation on street harassment. The piece was commissioned by the Bronx Museum of Arts, towards the show titled Street Art-Street Life, curated by Lydia Yee.
Select Artist in Residence Programmes:
2023 Rockefeller Foundation at Bellagio with CARE Foundations Art for Gender Equality Programme. https://www.care.org/gender-equality-artist-fellowship/jasmeen-patheja/
2018 Institute For Gender, Sexuality Studies and Feminist Studies, McGill University, visiting resident for Meet To Sleep and I Never Ask For It.
2013- ongoing: Artist in Residency Program Artist in Residence at Srishti Institute of Art Design and Technology, Bangalore.
2010 Arts 3331 Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan, building ‘Tokyo Action Heroes’ with Blank Noise.
2010 Akademie Schloss Solitude, Germany, with Inderjit Kaur.
2008 Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK, Blank Noise.
2007 – 2008 Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart Germany
https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/person/jasmeen-patheja/
Patheja mobilises communities, by designing social interventions in spaces across streets, parks, campuses, and public transport. The interventions are designed to initiate a conversation on gender-based violence and invite take responsibility to co-create safe environments. Select public interventions include Walk Towards Healing/I Never Ask For It , Being Idle and Meet To Sleep.
In 2020 BBMP, Bangalore Police and Karnataka State Commission For Women, supported by Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology worked with Blank Noise to build the Step By Step Guide To Unapologetic Walking Mural.
News Publication https://bangaloremirror.indiatimes.com/bangalore/others/writings-on-the-wall/articleshow/74484307.cms
