Simorgh Publications

The publications selected for inclusion in our Editing Women Archive reflect how enmeshed the organisation’s research and activism work was with their creative productions – there was no clear distinction between the two. 

For example, the manual for screen printing created by Lala Rukh, In Our Own Backyard (1987), was ostensibly an art-focused publication, but the reason for its existence is clearly political: local printers controlled by the government in Lahore refused to print the Women’s Action Forum’s (WAF’s) protest materials and newsletters. As a response, Lala Rukh began screen printing, designing, and producing posters herself. During the late 1980s, she set up printmaking workshops to assist women involved in similar movements in the region. The screen-printing manual was devised by Rukh for these workshops, which would usually take place in the backyard of her Lahore home.

Similarly, In the Court of Women (produced by the Simorgh Women’s Collective and the Asian Women’s Human Rights Council, 1995) is a report on a public tribunal on violence against women. It led to twenty-five art therapy workshops across Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa organised as a way of collectively documenting and releasing the trauma from stories of violence that had emerged in the tribunal. The culmination of these workshops was the Trinjan quilt project, designed to co-create a visual testimony to violence in the lives of Pakistani women. Over the span of a year, twenty-five panels were made by various groups of women, of whom the youngest child was five, and the eldest woman was in her seventies. The quilt travelled to schools, villages, poor urban settlements, affluent homes, and a number of women’s conferences. The Quilt Book (by Anjana Raza, 1995), also included in the materials, is a poetic retelling of many of these stories and an homage to all the women who sewed this quilt together.