Featured Organization
The Fearless Collective
South Asia
“In the face of fear, we are capable of tremendous love.” That is what every towering, strikingly painted Fearless Collective mural signifies. The Fearless Collective is a public arts movement based out of South Asia that strives to help communities engage in critical social justice conversations and reclaim public spaces through participatory art. Working with communities of women and misrepresented people around the world, Fearless brings together art and resistance to facilitate healing and empowerment.
Founded in 2012 by Bangalore-based artist Shilo Shiv Suleman, Fearless emerged as a response to the powerful countrywide protests following the Nirbhaya tragedy that occurred in Delhi. Growing out of this moment of jarring national trauma, Fearless embodies transformation through coming together. Fearless applies a tried and tested methodology that combines ideas of “symbol, ritual and storytelling.” Stories ground lived communal experiences in bodies; ritual serves to create bodily catharsis and transmutation; and symbols unite these inner and outer lives through artistic representation. After attending workshops specifically designed to facilitate healing of the self through immersion in the collective imagination, participants pick up paint brushes to immortalize their resistance.
Over the last two years, adapting to the COVID-19 pandemic, Fearless has continued to organize various online social interventions and gatherings. In 2016, Fearless Collective attended the 13th AWID International Forum in Costa de Sauipe, Brazil, along with 1,700 women from around the world. Over the course of the workshops, “Fearless Futures: A Feminist Cartographer’s Toolkit” was developed as an open source methodology meant to inform organizing and activism. The Collective also conceived of its Ambassador Program in 2018. After facing long delays due to the pandemic, Fearless is now offering residencies to women from South Asia and beyond. Their first residency finally kicked off in Colombo, Sri Lanka in March 2022, and they plan to host future residencies in India and Uzbekistan.
Since its inception, Fearless has facilitated the creation of over 40 murals in more than 10 countries. Proclaiming ‘radical participation’ as part of their mission statement, Fearless has connected artists to local communities of marginalized people in India, Pakistan, South Africa, Brazil, and Canada, among others. They aim, especially, to carve out public space for women in South Asia, who are so often invisible in the public realm. As Bochra Triki, a Tunisian feminist activist, puts it, “we took back a space in which we never felt we belonged, where we were used to walking fast to avoid male gazes and sharp words.”
Art, literature, and poetry flow as forces of change for Fearless Collective. In 2019, Fearless co-created the Ishq Inquilab Mohabbat Zindabad mural in Shaheen Bagh, New Delhi, during protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill which discriminated against equal citizenship rights for Indian Muslims. As protests grew across the nation, women gathered in Shaheen Bagh and spoke of strength, love, and revolution. Slowly, other members of the protest flocked to the site of the mural, a group of men, women and children drawn in by the atmosphere of collective care and declarations of a kinder, more inclusive future. This act of peaceful resistance imbued the space with a permanent sanctity, which was honored by the collaborative creation of a sprawling mural.
Like so, Fearless has challenged and intersected notions of national trauma, space, and the body across nations. In Rawalpindi, Pakistan, a mural was created in collaboration with transgender activist Bubbli Malik. In Johannesburg, South Africa, a mural immortalizing the female form was created in response to the history of sexual crimes against women. In Olivença, Brazil, the Tupinamba people came together with Fearless to reclaim an indigenous ancestral graveyard that was taken over by the church.
This transformation of fear into spaces of love through active community participation is undoubtedly impactful; more importantly, it shows us how these impacts reach powerfully beyond the individual to burrow into a nation’s social conscience. Rather than following an inflexible pedagogy, Fearless successfully centers love as the impetus for reclamation. As we come up against the limits of non-violent resistance in various ways today, the Fearless movement acts as a shining example of its impact and legacy.
To find out more about The Fearless Collective, follow them on social media:
The Fearless Collective Website
By Maya Razvi, April 2022. Maya is a junior at Bennington College studying Visual Arts and Literature.