Jiyo Re Laado ("Come alive, dear daughter")

Jiyo Re Laado is an interactive street art installation that uses collaborative painting to surface the assumptions we carry about gender roles. Held at Delhi’s Dilli Haat cultural marketplace, the work unfolds across three thematic canvases, each inviting a distinct mode of reflection.

The first canvas features invited artists who paint women’s narratives—mothers who sacrifice, voiceless goddesses, figures of power and transcendence. Together, these images question which stories are told, and who gets to be seen and celebrated.

The second canvas opens to the public. Participants imagine unconventional roles for women—bus conductors, farmers, rocket scientists—alongside candid expressions of fear and belief: “save me from strangers,” “women only fight,” “women = 10 men.” This space captures both aspiration and constraint, revealing how possibility and prejudice coexist.

The third canvas makes implicit bias visible. Faced with a grid of professions—surgeon, nurse, ballet dancer, doctor—participants confront their own gendered assumptions and then actively revise them, marking “pink” or “blue” cells to challenge and reconfigure their initial responses.

Together, the three canvases trace a progression: from representation, to revelation, to revision. The installation suggests that gender is not innate but socially absorbed—constructed through narratives we inherit, reinforce, and, ultimately, have the power to rethink.