Women, Azaadi, Shadhinota, Freedom

This thesis investigates the intersections of performance, memory, race, and erasure through the lens of feminist, decolonial, and diasporic practice. Centering the body as both archive and site of resistance, I explore how performance intervenes in dominant historical narratives by foregrounding voices and experiences that have been silenced, displaced, or deemed unarchivable. Drawing from personal experience as a South Asian Muslim woman navigating academia in the U.S., my work examines how structures suppress grief, dissent, and political witnessing—particularly when the lives in question are racialized, feminized, or marginalized. Through installations, photographs, and time-based performances such as Aam Pata Jora Jora, What Is the Cost of Life? The Brown Pilgrim, Who Cleans After a Genocide? and Present: 0, I challenge the permanence of archives and monuments, proposing performance as a radical, embodied alternative for remembering. Each work addresses systemic violence—from colonial gender scripts and racialized policing to global genocidal silence—inviting the audience to confront their own roles as bystanders, beneficiaries, or implicated subjects. By referencing theorists such as Sara Ahmed, Gayatri Spivak, Michael Rothberg, Rebecca Schneider, I frame my practice within a critical discourse that interrogates institutional complicity and the politics of visibility. Ultimately, this thesis proposes performance as a fugitive space where erased histories and buried voices are momentarily resurrected, where mourning itself becomes a radical act, and where survival is reframed as resistance.