Dharavi resident Mehzabeen Shaikh has a cupboard full of emoticon-shaped stuffed toys made from scraps of brightly coloured textiles. It represents, she said, the many emotions and experiences that she and her neighbouring women generally keep hidden from view. Shaikh’s cupboard is one of the highlights of Ghar Pe, a unique exhibition of art work by Dharavi women opening this fortnight. The exhibition, which is designed to look and feel like one of the women’s homes, is the result of an art program run by the Society for Nutrition, Education and Health Action (Sneha), a non-profit organisation that has been working in urban slums since 1999.

Shaikh, a 23-year-old commerce graduate from LS Raheja College, is one of the eight seamstresses from the NGO’s livelihood generation program which gets women from neighbouring slums to train and work at the in-house tailoring workshop inside the central office in Santa Cruz. They have been meeting with costume designer and textile artist Susie Vickery and multimedia artist Nandita Kumar three times a week since last May to work on the Dekha Undekha project, conceptualised to blend discussions of health and nutrition with workshops on enhancing their existing skills sets and artistic talent. The art program also consists of a sixmember photography team led by photographer Sudharak Olwe, made up of Sneha sanginis and volunteers, trained by the NGO to intervene in cases of domestic violence in their localities, and a group of five women from the Kumbharwada in Dharavi trained by studio potters and ceramic artists Anjani Khanna, Rashi Jain and Neha Kudchadkar.

The installation, which will be on display at a municipal school in Dharavi, will be accompanied by a series of activities and guided tours conducted by the participants for locals including expecting mothers and school children. Priya Agrawal, project head of Dekha Undekha and a senior advisor at Sneha, said that even though much of the exhibition has been designed specifically for the neighbourhood, she hopes Ghar Pe will be the first in a series of attempts to make the NGO’s extensive research in areas of public health and nutrition more accessible. Said Agrawal, “For most, public health just doesn’t fall inside the periphery of their own lives.”

For the most part, Ghar Pe functioned as a home science project where participants were encouraged to use their imagination to create conversation starters out of everyday household objects to fill the model home. So you can expect to see dish-racks brimming with utensils plastered with images of sanitation problems and the solutions adopted in Dharavi, large sieves featuring malarial parasites and typhoid bacteria embroidered on to them and windows and curtains that represent the women’s dreams of looking out at lush gardens and butterflies juxtaposed with images of garbage dumps and mosquitoes they really see outside their homes. Other objects include a pickle jar wrapped up in a calendar with the women’s menstrual cycle highlighted using stickers saying “Don’t touch me”, which are usually found on auto rickshaws, to illustrate a popular superstition.

Apart from artworks on specific issues like nutrition, popular home remedies, garbage disposal, domestic violence and maternal care, participants also worked on more personal projects during workshops including making rag dolls to represent their biggest worries and slippers to represent their wildest dreams. Mahananda Tikam, a 41-year-old tailoring tutor at Sneha, created a doll with faucets for hands to represent the water cuts in her neighbourhood that force her to wake up at odd hours of the night while her slippers featured her favourite blouse patterns and tools to express her dream of becoming a renowned fashion designer someday.