Method will mark its debut in Germany with a powerful new exhibition titled ‘Ladies Compartment’. It will be hosted in collaboration with Gallery Melike Bilir in Hamburg. This exhibition will feature six dynamic Indian women artists and be part of India Week Hamburg 2025.
Opening June 24, Ladies Compartment draws its title from the gender-segregated carriages of Mumbai’s local trains—introduced in 1907 to offer women a measure of safety and autonomy. These spaces remain a potent symbol of paradox: at once refuge and restriction, sanctuary and segregation.
The exhibition expands this metaphor to examine how women inhabit, resist, and reimagine the many compartments—literal, cultural, emotional—that shape their realities, revealing how resilience is cultivated again and again.
Ladies Compartment is on view from June 24 to July 20, 2025, at Gallery Melike Bilir, Fleetinsel, Hamburg.
Here’s a glimpse of what each artist is presenting:
- Pulitzer winning photojournalist Anushree Fadnavis brings her decade-long project #traindiaries, capturing life inside the Mumbai local’s ladies compartment—an intimate photojournalistic archive of kinship, solitude, and shared routine.
- Photographer and Filmmaker Avani Rai presents Women of Gurdaspur, a haunting meditation on land, memory, and belonging, emerging from her ancestral connection to Punjab.
- Interdisciplinary artist Darshika Singh shows In A Single Thought, a video work that plays with rhythm, gesture, and repetition to explore perception and the metaphysical.
- Visual artist Keerthana Kunnath exhibits Not What You Saw, a bold photo series on Indian female bodybuilders that reclaims strength, visibility, and feminine power outside dominant narratives.
- Visual artist and photographer Krithika Sriram uses rose petal pigment to make Kuvalai Anthotypes—fleeting self-portraits that reflect the erasure of Dalit female histories while reclaiming them through the medium itself.
- Photographer and creative director Shaheen Peer presents a series of faceless self-portraits draped in sarees—sculptural images that reflect on memory, gesture, and the body’s quiet presence across time.
Exhibition Details :
Title: Ladies Compartment
Opening Reception: June 24, 2025
Exhibition Dates: June 24 – July 20, 2025
Venue: Gallery Melike Bilir, Fleetinsel, Hamburg
Presented by: Method (India), in collaboration with Gallery Melike Bilir
Artists: Anushree Fadnavis, Avani Rai, Darshika Singh, Keerthana Kunnath, Krithika Sriram, Shaheen Peer
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