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Mai Ni Meriye 2024 - Ongoing
Womanhood in the Mountains: A Contemporary Archive
56 Pigment Prints on Archival Paper
@mai_ni_meriye
‘Mai Ni Meriye*,’ shot over two years, explores villages nestled in the foothills of the Himalayan mountains, in Dharamshala, Himachal Pradesh, India capturing the indescribable details of womanhood through portraits of everyday life and labor.
This exhibition is a contemporary archive of the overlooked cultural gendered life happening against the backdrop of the towering Dhauladhar mountain ranges. While travelers often come to take in the beauty of the hills, and escape the woes of urban life, ‘Mai Ni Meriye’ directs the audience’s attention to the region’s local women, invisible labor, and femininity, embedded and everlasting among the landscape.
In this collection of photographs on display, and in the photobook, Farheen Fatima adds visual language to Aashna Singh’s study on labor and identity in women. Farheen’s intimate and tender lens personifies womanhood in nature, homes, and objects in addition to the women who consistently exercise care for their families, the land, and the livestock.
This project is a reminder of how both universal and complex womanhood can be.
Premiering at The Other Space, a locally-owned Gallery and Cafe in Dharamshala, this traveling exhibition is beginning at Home. On view June - September 2026.
*‘Mai Ni Meriye,’ locally translates to “oh dear mother,”
and is a reference to a popular Himachali folk song
passed down by generations.
Farheen Fatima is a photographer based in Chandigarh, India. Her practice focuses on tenderness, belonging, and the emotional landscapes of everyday life, often in overlooked small cities and public spaces. Working primarily with digital, film, and cyanotypes, often hand altered to make emotional additions, she builds intimate narratives that resist spectacle, foregrounding softness, care, and memory. Her series Meet Me In The Garden was exhibited by Photoink Gallery at the India Art Fair 2023 (New Delhi) and Chennai Photo Biennale 2024. She was part of the Serendipity Arts Festival 2024 (Goa) and India Art Fair 2026 (New Delhi). Internationally, her work has been shown at the Sharjah Art Foundation 2022 (UAE), Kuala Lumpur Photo Awards 2022 (Malaysia), London Art Week 2023 (UK), Der Greif 2023 (Germany) and Jameel Arts Center 2025 (UAE). Her work has been featured by Apple, Getty Images, Vogue India, Platform Magazine, Homegrown India, and Critical Collective amongst others. She holds a Master’s in History of Art from Panjab University, Chandigarh. She received the TOTO Photography Award in 2022 and is the recipient of the Experimenter Generator Co-Operative Art Production Fund 2025.
Aashna Singh is researcher and multimedia producer living between the States and India. She completed her B.A. in Economics from Barnard College, and Columbia University in 2019, and a M.A. in Gender and Sexuality Studies from The University of Chicago in 2025. Her M.A. thesis ‘The Labor of Love Project’ was the recipient of the ‘Intrepid’ Thesis Award for ambitious, public-facing thesis projects that cross between critical and creative modes. Her work primarily examines the social, cultural, and economic aspects of womanhood with special attention to the institutions of marriage, motherhood, and family. In 2023, Aashna left New York City to pursue her research from her grandmother’s home in Dharamshala, Himachal Pradesh, India. In 2024, she began production of a larger ongoing project, titled ‘Mai Ni Meriye’, which includes a photobook and short documentary film. The photobook is available in Dharamshala, Mumbai, Chicago, New York City, London, and Paris and the documentary has been screened in Dharamshala, Chandigarh, Chicago, and London.
