Close your eyes for a minute, take a deep breath and think about the times when fear held you back from doing something that you really wanted to. As a child, you wanted to play with an adorable puppy you met on the street. It was wounded and you asked your mother if the puppy could come home with you. But she told you that strays bite. You were too scared to pet dogs again. A few years down the line, you wanted to go out for a party wearing that pretty LBD you brought online. But you were told that showing too much skin meant that you were inviting unwanted attention. Since that day, you haven’t been comfortable in short clothing. A few more years later, you wanted to go out with your boyfriend on a dinner date. But again, you were told to not roam around in the dark and that too with a boy. It was sure to bring your family a bad name. Also, who can forget Nirbhaya? It’s ironic, isn’t it, that the name which translates to fearless is used to induce fear?
But imagine a world where all the fear in your life is replaced by unconditional love through art. That is what artist Shilo Shiv Suleman is aiming at. Her initiative Fearless Collective has been working towards breaking barriers and eliminating fear and hence, creating safer spaces in the society for people. At 28, this Bengaluru-based artist is essaying powerful stories, defying stereotypes and fighting against society’s double standards and rape culture. Till date, the collective has showcased its art in eight countries, affirming positive messages.
Art was always around her growing up. Shilo’s mother, Nilofer Suleman, is a well-known artist herself and she was instrumental in teaching little Shilo to have faith in the capabilities of a woman and to believe in the power of art. “My mother belongs to a traditional North Indian Muslim family. She started to paint after she separated from my father and had to earn a living to raise me and my brother. Through art, she built a universe of beauty around her all the time,” recalls Shilo, who likes to believe that she has many ‘parallel lives’, Fearless Collective is one of them. In another life, she combines art and technology to create beautiful installations at art festivals all around the world, including the Burning Man.
A turning point in her life was a trip that she took to Delhi in the winter of 2012. “I was young and straight out of college. I’d given a TED talk and things were different. That was also the time when the Nirbhaya protest broke out. I then happened to listen to the stories of women who were opening up about gender-based violence. But one thing that I noticed was that the media was only telling us not to do many things. All of the reportage was very fear-based,” she narrates. That was the trigger point that initiated the Fearless Collective, where women were encouraged to come together and tell stories, with a motive to eliminate fear.
“Usually, you see posters of women as actors, politicians or models on the streets. You rarely see representations of real women who actually inhabit that space. These are the images that I want my daughters to see growing up. It began with these representations and since then, it has grown into this beautiful movement of people telling their stories in public space,” she says, adding, “The idea is to give anyone easy access to create something beautiful and tell their own story.” Shilo is the lead artist for the collective and others join her on a project basis. Mostly, the co-artists aren’t people with an art background.
There are four full-time members including Shilo and Nida Mushtaq, who is the co-founder based in Pakistan. There is also a photographer and a person who takes care of raising funds.
“We usually identify the community to work with, choose a theme based on the issues they face and encourage the members to tell their tales. From the stories, ideas and images that emerge, we ask them to represent themselves. People who are painting with us, end up drawing self-portraits initially,” she says.
Shilo takes us back to the time when she created one of her first murals. “I was travelling to Haridwar to attend the Kumbh Mela, where I met a Sadhu. I asked him about how women are worshipped as goddesses, but the same goddesses are abused in real life. He told me ‘If you want to be worshipped as a goddess, treat yourself like one’. That didn’t make much sense to me initially, but after much contemplation, I realised that we wait for someone else us to worship us. By the end of that trip, I painted Durga with her tiger on a wall and next to her, was the image of a little girl with her cat,” she says.
Shilo also talks to us about how, with the collective, she has worked with indigenous women in Brazil, refugees of Syria and Palestine, transgender sex workers in Indonesia and the Khwaja Siras (transgenders) in Pakistan. Shilo was also the first artist to create a mammoth mural of a Khwaja Sira in Pakistan. Clad in a pink salwar kameez and riding a motorbike, the woman in the mural says Hum Hain Takhleeq-e-Khuda (I am a creation of Allah).
In the past five years, there have been a lot of positive outcomes that make Shilo proud as an artist. A few years ago, a 17-year-old Palestinian refugee in Beirut painted a mural with her, on the concept of home. He was so inspired by the idea and today, he owns a house where he runs an Airbnb accommodation. She’s also worked with the daughters of sex workers in Okhla, Delhi, where the collective was painting walls with an aim to make the streets safer for girls. “There were a lot of men staring at the girls while we painted, which obviously made them uncomfortable. We painted a wall full of staring eyes and graffiti that said Buri nazar wale, dil se dekho. Aankhon se nahi (People with an evil eye, look at us with your heart, not with your eyes). Today, that street is one of the safest places in Okhla for women,” she concludes proudly.
