Mai Ni Meriye, Womanhood in the Mountains: A Contemporary Archive

05/06/2026

Opening the night of the traveling exhibition at The Other Space gallery in Dharamshala, India - a locally-owned gallery and cafe founded in 2019 by the team behind Illiterati books & coffee, promoting the work of emerging and established artists from Dharamshala and around the globe. The photobook and short film debuted at The Other Space two years ago in a closed private event for the interviewees and community members, making it all the more special to bring to life a larger gallery exhibition where it all began - now open to locals and travelers alike. The program included local music artists Rishika Sharma and Ajay Dhiman, gracing the audience with traditional regional folk music in front of the exhibition’s feature piece. A framed photograph of a woman holding a child in a wide green field, surrounded by parwane, moths, flying towards the sun centered on a bright red wall. 

Mai Ni Meriye, Womanhood in the Mountains features the work of Farheen Fatima, a Chandigarh based photographer whose practice focuses on tenderness, belonging, and the emotional landscapes of everyday life often overlooked in small cities and public spaces. ‘Mai Ni Meriye’ began with Aashna Singh in 2024, a researcher and multimedia producer, born out of her ongoing academic and personal interest in the relationship between labor and identity in women. Mai Ni Meriye sought to learn more about the experiences of women: as mothers, wives, sisters, daughters within the traditional family household, and society at large.  Historically, “carework” or “domestic work” is perceived as naturally “feminine”, encouraging a false biological destiny for women in which appreciation or “love”– rather than wages or money– is meant to serve as its own reward for the work. Inspired by the International Wages for Housework movement, now known as Global Women’s Strike, Mai Ni Meriye set out to understand housework from women at the grassroots level. Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) combats the ideology of the “natural”, when everything we live out today is in fact a not natural but socialized process, normalized by societal repetition over decades, and centuries. Mai Ni Meriye’s larger goal is to galvanize interest in the “labor of love”, from small village discussions over tea, to mainstream platforms with influential voices - all in service of a new perspective on womanhood. 

The project is a love letter to the women of Dharamshala, and women everywhere, who create and sustain life with grit and grace. It seeks to ensure that their knowledge and way of life is archived, and widely shared. Shot over two years, ‘Mai Ni Meriye,’ explores villages nestled in the foothills of the Himalayan mountains, capturing details of womanhood through portraits of everyday life and labor. This exhibition is a contemporary archive of the overlooked cultural gendered life happening against the backdrop of the towering Dhauladhar mountain ranges. While travelers often come to take in the beauty of the hills and escape the woes of urban life, ‘Mai Ni Meriye’ directs the audience’s attention to the region’s local women, embedded and everlasting among the landscape. Mai Ni Meriye aims to invite as many people as possible into the conversation on the complexities of womanhood, and to expose the system of women’s labor from the mountains to beyond.

“During installation, a few of the staff members working at the gallery stopped Farheen and myself to tell us that our photographs reminded them of home… which is the highest compliment we could have asked for. That’s the point – to remember home, and the women behind every home.”

The exhibition takes the themes from the photobook further, expanding from the subject of women’s work into a holistic picture of womanhood. Whilst the photobook production followed a tight itinerary with designated times, places, and people, the exhibition takes images from the book and adds more visuals from spontaneous travel around the town, capturing authentic, real-time moments. The three gallery walls consist of 56 pigment prints on archival paper. The entry wall immediately invites viewers into the world of women in Dharamshala, including images of nature, landscapes, homes and household objects - a reminder of how both universal and complex womanhood can be. 

The opening was followed by a two-day free photobook pop-up library in collaboration with Editions JOJO, a publishing imprint, bookshop, library, and platform for visual culture based in Mumbai. Gallery visitors were invited to browse through a curated collection from JOJO’s large and vast inventory - photobooks from the library such as Gauri Gill’s Balika Mela complemented the exhibition's themes, with the designated space for lively discussion among fellow artists and interested individuals. 

The traveling exhibition is supported by PhotoSouthAsia, a project of the MurthyNAYAK Foundation. PhotoSouthAsia supports photography and photo education that addresses social and cultural issues.