L eena Kejriwal started her career as a photographer in 2002, even though she hadn’t had any training in the art. The 49-year-old photographer and installation artist, has been brand ambassador for Fuji India and an artist in residence in France. Her seminal work Calcutta: Repossessing the City was launched in 2007 and her works were part of Sotheby’s Spring Asian Art auction in March 2009. Her two-part photography installation, East City, was displayed in Iran as “I saw that which remained unseen,” and in Berlin as “When Violence became decadent”. Her work has reflected her preoccupation with human trafficking and has found a new language in her public art work MISSING, which was launched at the India Art Fair, February 2014.
Speaking about MISSING, Leena says she came into close contact with victims of human trafficking in various cities during her travels across cities. “The cries were too loud to not be heard,” she says. These encounters stayed with her and she decided to base her art on the understanding drawn from these visits. MISSING focuses on the issue of human trafficking and prostitution of young girls and how they become invisible to the rest of society. “It is appalling that we, as a society, don’t flinch at the plight of these young girls,” says the Kolkata-based artist. She condemns the way people brush aside the problem of prostitution. “It is our responsibility to behave sensitively towards the existence and issues of trafficked women.”
Leena created several art installations across the country and exhibited her work in various spaces, but she felt that, perhaps, her art was not reaching as many people as she would have wanted. “To see a mural or visit an exhibition, you still have to go out to look at it. So I thought of engaging with people by bringing the art to them in the form of an Augmented Reality (AR) application.”
Under MISSING, Leena worked on larger-than-life black silhouettes of young girls placed against the urban skyline. She explains the installations as holes into which millions of girls disappear into the dark world of prostitution. “MISSING aims to sensitise people to the desperate plight of millions of little girls who are trafficked for sexual exploitation. Just last week, 10 baby girls were found in West Bengal waiting to be sold. Why are we not moved by such instances? Today there are three million prostituted women in India, out of which 1.2 million are young girls. The average age of recruitment into prostitution is between nine and 12 years of. These are disturbing statistics. When I first started working with NGOs like Apne Aap, Hamari Muskan and New Light, I dealt with the issue by creating complicated installations within gallery spaces that brought up the dark realities of sex trafficking in a very graphic way. But this did not seem right. To create mass awareness, I realised I needed to distil the issue into a simple, engaging piece that spoke to everyone and transcended language and space. That is when MISSING emerged. It was launched to great reviews at the India Art Fair in January 2014.”
An AR game by the same name supplements these installations to engage users across age groups and help them experience what the missing girls are forced to go through. Leena started working on the MISSING game in October 2015 and it was launched in October this year with the aim of spreading awareness about the issue. Leena plans to launch the game in regional languages and also to take it to an international platform. “There was no marketing, the promotion was only by word of mouth,” says Leena.
While finalising the game’s narrative, Leena visited brothels and villages along with developer Satyajit Chakraborty. “Since Satyajit had not interacted with trafficked victims before, we had him talk to them to get the insights that he needed to develop the game. These interactions helped the required interface,” she says.
Talking about violence against women and child sex-trafficking, Leena says people don’t engage enough. “The Nirbhaya rape case was a slap on our face. There were many cases of brutal rape and assault on women before and numerous cases after too. People need to talk more openly about these things. Being numb to these issues should not be an option. We should bring the topic out of the closet, make people talk about it and not allow these crimes around us even passively. Good people are not loud enough and it is time that we become pro-active enough to make a difference,” she says, adding that she wants to take the conversation forward through her cause.
The game is available for download for both Android and iPhone users. For more, visit www.savinggirls.com
