Disrupting the system: Kaali Collective at Counter Foto

"It's infantilising bollocks. It's ghetto-ising, a subsection of success. It's the kid's table of awards." — Fleabag, 2019.

When women create, they are too often met with a patronising surprise : "Oh, women can also do this?",  as if their capacity to challenge, build, or critique is an outcome of a "quota" that is provided by the patriarchal society, a token. Even in the liberal corridors of art, there remains a subtle infantilisation: permission is granted, but only within certain boundaries. You may speak, but softly; you may succeed, but in your section. And you are not allowed to critique them as every publicity is good publicity and at least you are being publicised. 

On October 28 at Counter Foto, three members of the collective, Sadia Mariam Rupa, Gayatree Arun, and Jayantee Raina, spoke about their seven-year journey of questioning, disrupting, and rebuilding. Formed in 2018 as students in Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, Kaali is composed of six women photographers whose individual practices converge on shared ground: the need to disrupt deeply rotten and exclusionary systems that the society accepts as given.

They describe themselves as a collective because collectives are born out of requirement. When a shared need arises, they come together to act toward a collective aim. When that need changes or when alignment fades, the form dissolves and a new one begins to form. For them, collectivity is not a permanent identity but a necessary response to a moment. They do not claim to be pioneers of such work, acknowledging that others have gathered before them under similar circumstances.

The reason behind them being called Kaali is because Kaali carries many meanings. It refers to the goddess Mahakaali, a figure of creation and destruction, who holds multiple faces and embodies transformation. The collective sees this multiplicity reflected in themselves. They contain multitudes and shift form according to what the time demands. In moments of reflection they become an archive; in moments of unrest they become shelter. During the July 2024 revolution and the student protests across Bangladesh, they created safe spaces, provided documentation, and offered solidarity through image and presence. Their practice also extended into community workshops, mentorship for younger photographers, and field work on displacement and public memory. 

Kaali's work interrogates the very conditions that define it. "We poke at things that don't even need poking," one of them said, half in jest, half in conviction. Their insistence on prodding what appears unproblematic reveals their deeper artistic project, to expose how structure disguises oppression as order. 

Their projects trace a movement through artistic and political terrains that mirror the shifting ground beneath South Asian women's lives. In 2020, their collaboration "Bridging the Naf" was exhibited in The Collective Body section of the Dhaka Art Summit, under the theme Seismic Movements. Twelve photographs were each printed three hundred times, amounting to 3,600 small cards and it blurred the line between art object and artifact. Visitors were invited to pick, pocket, and carry these fragments away. 

Kaali also worked together with Thuma Collective from Myanmar, another group of women photographers navigating a different but eerily similar landscape of constraint. Kaali emerged within Bangladesh's patriarchal art circuits, and Thuma under Myanmar's military regime. Their women had their safety seemingly protected by the presence of authority. Yet a different kind of restriction existed: limited access to education, creative independence, and civic participation. 

In both, the structures of power are disguised as guardianship. Both groups understand that freedom without access is not freedom, and visibility without agency is another kind of invisibility.

​​In "Bridging the Naf",  the exhibition, supported by Norwegian People's Aid, was conceived as a series of paired collaborations between women photographers from Myanmar and Bangladesh. The process began in early 2019 where twelve photographers from Kaali Collective and Thuma Collective began working together in Yangon. Their initiative sought to establish a residency that could facilitate both cultural exchange and geographic movement. 

The plan quickly met a roadblock when the Myanmar participants were denied visas to travel to Bangladesh. Instead of halting the project, both groups continued the collaboration from their respective countries, exchanging photographs, texts, and ideas over the next six months. 

Kaali's participation in Chobi Mela Shunno (2021), titled "Null and Void", examined the photobook as both medium and concept. Taking "null and void" to mean without legal or formal validity, the collective questioned how photobooks might move beyond institutional validation to embody uncertainty, suspension, and introspection. Their work explored the photobook's capacity to hold contradiction, content and discontent, form and formlessness, presence and absence, while reflecting on how structure can simultaneously create and dismantle meaning. 

They also spoke of "Operation Marine Drive: A Full-Length Bengali Movie". Founding Members of the collective,  Sadia Mariam Rupa and Aungmakhai Chak, just received the Generator Fund three months ago to publish their forthcoming photobook. Conceived as an ensemble of text and photographs, the project investigates the atmosphere of unspoken fear, surveillance, and secrecy that pervades the Marine Drive road.

At the Counter Foto session, the members of Kaali reflected on the seven years that had brought them to this point. They spoke of a new urgency that now drives their practice and shapes their path going forward. After years of working, they now feel a new sense of urgency, compelled to act faster, to experiment, and to expand the scope of what their collective can hold. 

As one of the region's most influential pedagogical spaces, Pathshala has shaped generations of visual practitioners. Still, even within its progressive framework a mould endures. Kaali's emergence marks a conscious step away from that structure. Kaali's formation constitutes an attempt to construct a language of art freed from discipline, suggesting that art acquires new meaning when it steps outside institutional structure and speaks in its own language.