Inside The Utopia: Linsey Young On Curating 'Women On The Edge Of Time'

It is a group show. A cluster of nine women artists. While someone is a nonagenarian in the roster, someone else is fairly young, bringing to the show a broad scope for insight. The questions revolve around  bodily autonomy, ecology, inheritance, labour and more, and as you ascend from the ground floor, witnessing rather fragile installations and artworks that reclaim the Western nude tradition through a female gaze, the first floor confronts you with political posters and photographs of women leading protests from the late 20th-century. However, when curator Linsey Young sits down to talk about her new exhibition, she doesn't begin with an artist, or a theme, or even a gallery. She begins with a book.

The Conception Of Woman on the Edge of Time

"I've always wanted to make a show about this book," she says of Marge Piercy's 1976 novel Woman on the Edge of Time — the unlikely conceptual spine of Women on the Edge of Time, opening at Vadehra Art Gallery in New Delhi on August 21.

The novel came into Young's orbit sideways, while she was researching an earlier exhibition, Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970, at Tate. "I was asking all the artists what fiction they were reading in the '70s and '80s to get into their headspace," she recalls, and it was the painter Lubaina Himid, winner of the Turner Prize, who told her the book had been "absolutely key to her and to her feminist discoveries." Young read it and was hooked. "It's essentially a sci-fi novel about a woman in America who is institutionalised, held by the state and drugged in a psychiatric unit," she explains. "When she's drugged, her mind ends up somewhere else — in a utopia, in a commune... It shows a way to think about the future."

A Poisoned World And Livable Futures

What Young found in Piercy's pages, she says, was less a plot than a set of preoccupations she recognised in the studios of artists she already admired. "Certain motifs, I'd say — the poisoning of the world," she says, describing her own long-standing interest in communes, in people who live off-grid with an eye on ecological crises, and in "ancestral methods of farming" as ways of imagining a livable future. It's one of the threads that run through the exhibition's ecological works, from Sheba Chhachhi's Strange Manufactory — an assemblage of some six hundred pieces of laboratory glassware confronting pharmaceutical exploitation — to Anju Dodiya's and Gurminder Sikand's paintings, which draw on the ecofeminist Chipko movement and women's historical, spiritual ties to the natural world. Ashfika Rahman's work, meanwhile, turns to the displacement wrought by flooding and climate change.

A Certain Neurosis

The exhibition's title also nods, deliberately, to a long and uneasy tradition of associating women with crisis. On that note, I quizzed Young on this longstanding association with women of being on the verge, on edge, of neurosis, of a certain historically sensualised depiction of women in chaotic immediacy, citing Pedro Almodóvar's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, among others. “It’s an interesting question,” says Young, adding that she thinks “it's probably because we are so often made to feel marginal, and made to feel our experiences are not as valid as those of men." She points to medicine as one example, noting that “there’s a lot of incredible writing at the moment about medical testing, and how the vast majority of it has historically been done on men’s bodies.” Even the ways in which women are taught to recognise a heart attack, she says, can differ from the symptoms typically taught to men: “The signs of a heart attack in a woman are completely different from those a man is taught to look for — pain in the arm, and so on. That kind of detail is replicated over and over in our lives.”

“I think all the women I know and work with feel like we’re constantly working harder, because of our gender, to prove ourselves.” “They feel like we’re hysterical, as if we don’t know what we’re doing when really we’re on edge,” she says. “What actually makes us mad is not being taken seriously.”

Inheritance, Not Imitation

If ecology gives the show its atmosphere, inheritance gives it its structure. Young has spoken of inheritance as something "actively negotiated rather than simply received" — an idea that shaped how she paired artists across generations, from Sheba Chhachhi's protest photography and Mumtaz Karimjee's portraits of Indian women activists (the two have collaborated since the 1980s) to Arpita Singh, now ninety, showing alongside artists decades her junior. "As a curator, I'm not someone who's necessarily always looking for the new," Young says. "I'm much more interested in what I might have missed, and in reframing." What unites the artists, she suggests, is patience rather than trend-chasing: "I think what these artists are always looking at is longevity... They're not interested in a quick fix."

Precedents And Art That Is  Useful In The World

Asked which artists or histories of feminist art in South Asia she sees as important precedents for the show, Young is careful not to overstate her authority. "I wouldn't call myself an expert — I'm always learning," she says, before pointing straight to Sheba Chhachhi. She singles out Seven Lives and a Dream, now in Tate's collection, and a body of work she saw at MoMA — staged photographs of Chhachhi's friends, feminist activists, "capturing the importance of a movement many people wouldn't have taken seriously," showing it "as aspirational, proud of itself and its connections." That, Young says, is "the kind of work I'm most interested in — collaborative work that takes up space and power."

She is equally drawn to art that costs almost nothing to make. "I'm also very fond of work that's cheap to produce — posters, for instance," she says. "I find them really inspirational, because there's something about making a work of art that is useful in the world." Pressed for examples, she reaches first for India's Life Tools (a few posters from a series by Chachhi and Life Tools done for Delhi based group Saheli is at the exhibition), and then for London's See Red Women's Workshop, a feminist print collective that made posters to order for campaigns — an abortion-rights march, say — rather than working through a publisher. "The visuals are wonderful," she says. "They were very critical of the government too, and of capitalism." Young owns one herself: a print of Margaret Thatcher ringed with a list of her policy failures, captioned "My message to the women of our nation: tough." A second collective she cites, harder to trace today, made posters focused on Black and South Asian workers in Britain. "Those are the kinds of practices I mean," she says, "when I talk about art that goes out into the world."

Queer Histories, A Rigorous Scene And Contemporary Indian Art

Young's own curatorial formation runs through the queer political art of the '70s and '80s, and she is candid about how that shaped her negotiations with Vadehra. "It's obviously a negotiation and a conversation," she says of working with a gallery that already has "such a great selection" of its own artists, but she pushed to bring in names the gallery "perhaps hadn't considered before" — Mumtaz Karimjee among them, never previously shown in India. Two inclusions, she says, were non-negotiable: "there were a couple of things I insisted on — Mumtaz and Gurminder had to be in the show," partly because she wanted their work in dialogue with Anju Dodiya's.

On the contemporary Indian art scene, Young is candidly an outsider looking in — "I don't know it well, since I'm based in the UK" — but what strikes her, she says, is the depth of research behind the work she has encountered. She cites Ashfika Rahman as typical: "she'll go somewhere and work there for four years, taking photographs, deeply invested in those communities." It is, Young says, a "long-term, rigorous way of working" she finds genuinely inspiring.

Punk And The Music Scene

As a lot of Young's expertise and insights come from the 70s and 80s, I considered steering the conversation towards the UK music scene from the period, drawing on the late critic Mark Fisher and his blog k-punk. "So important," she says simply. She shared that when she first pitched Women in Revolt! to Tate, it began life as "a show about women and punk" before growing into something larger — though a whole room of the eventual exhibition stayed devoted to avant-garde and alternative music, accompanied by a compilation record now on Spotify. Young was in a punk band herself, raised inside DIY culture, and is quick to correct the received wisdom about the scene. "The global perception of punk is that it was a very male thing — that's not true," she says. "It was so much about women." She points to bands like The Raincoats and Ludus as evidence of the "cross-pollination of ideas" that came from squats and shared spaces, where "you didn't need any talent, you could just pick up an instrument." For Young, high and low culture sit on the same footing: "I think music is as valid in a show as fine art, whatever the genre."

Young’s Recommendations

Asked, finally, for a handful of galleries and museums worth a visit — anywhere in the world — Young doesn't hesitate long: White Cube in New York, Studio Voltaire in London, the Vienna Secession ("very traditional," she concedes), the Modern Institute in Glasgow, and Cabinet Gallery in London. "That makes five," she says.

Women on the Edge of Time opens to the public on August 21 alongside Defence Colony Gallery Night, preceded by a feminist dialogue between Urvashi Butalia of Zubaan Books and artist Sheba Chhachhi, moderated by Young, and followed the next day by a mending workshop and weaving circle hosted by Rafooghar. The show runs at Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, until September 18.