Monday, March 25, 2019
Girls not brides at Bangla Biennale
So my first exhibition for 2019 took place in West Bengal, India  from 8-20 February 2019.



The #banglabiennale organised by #narrativemovements is taking place in a small village in West Bengal. Komdhara is about 50km away from Kolkata.

I painted the Bengali bride as part of my #girlsnotbrides series as West Bengal has one of the highest rates for child marriages in India.

Been following their site to see how the festival is taking place and it looks really interesting as the village is covered in art, including installations as part of the landscape of the village. There's also a lot of performances happening throughout the festival duration.



From the first day that I painted #girlsnotbrides I had decided that it will be a series.
In this series you will see two right hands grabbing the child and forcing her into marriage. The hands represent the guy who is marrying her and the other her parents who force their children into marriage.



Each child bride is depicted in their cultures marriage customs. The bengalis have no mangalsutra and instead their red coral and white conch bangles, with the red tilak represent marriage.
But before I could start with the other groups in Malaysia this project came into place.

Bengal, India has had the most number of child marriages in the past few years compared to other eastern states, a report by the Child in Need Institute says.

The National Family Health Survey found 54 per cent of women in Bengal were married before 18 in 2005-06. In the 2015-16 survey, it dipped to 41.6. In the same survey, the highest number of child marriages was reported in Malda district and the lowest in Calcutta. In Malda, 55 per cent of girls were married off before they turned 18. It was 13 in Calcutta.

The report said the lowest percentage of child marriages was recorded in Punjab and Kerala at 7.6 per cent.

But kids are fighting back in bengal. Brave girls, aided by UNICEF, have fought off marital atrocities to return to the world of books and lead by example in Parliament a town in bengal, where almost 38.3 percent of young females get married before the age of 18. The female literacy
rate in the district is an abysmal 50.52 percent, a figure much lower than the state average of 70.54 percent.

There is a worldwide need to push against #childmarriage

And we must continously call for government to ban child marriages and push for a future for these children.
#redlineart
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