Colour amid Concrete - from 19 October

Colour amid Concrete is a multi-sensory exhibition of film, photography and installations exploring the lives of women in India who travel from rural villages in Rajasthan to the cities of Gujarat to work on large construction sites.

At the centre of the exhibition is Majoor 9195, a documentary film by award-winning filmmaker, Senior Lecturer and practice-based researcher Meera Darji.

The exhibition brings audiences into the physical and sensory world of construction work while revealing the lives that exist beyond the building site.

These women undertake strenuous manual labour—carrying bricks, materials and equipment—while also fulfilling their responsibilities as mothers and wives. Their working days can begin before sunrise and continue late into the evening, encompassing paid labour alongside cooking, cleaning, childcare and other domestic responsibilities.

Yet despite their essential contribution, many of these women are unregistered, unaccounted for and undercounted. As an unprotected labour force, they often receive very low pay while living and working in difficult conditions.

The film: Majoor 9195

Using a cinema vérité approach, Meera Darji spent extended periods of time with the women, observing their daily routines.

Filming from approximately 4am until 11pm, she documented the intensity of both their working and domestic lives. Long takes and minimal dialogue create space for audiences to experience the rhythms and sounds of the construction site.

The visceral soundscape of machinery, movement and manual labour becomes part of the film's sensory experience.

During her travels in India, Meera was struck by the number of women undertaking strenuous construction work, often carrying bricks and building materials while dressed in their beautiful sarees. Her subsequent research revealed the extent to which this workforce remains invisible within official systems of employment and recognition.

The numbers 9195 became significant within the film's exploration of the disparity between recorded and unregistered labour.

Building lives—and buildings

One of the most striking contradictions explored in Majoor 9195 is that these women help construct luxury apartments that they themselves may never live in.

This contrast between the worlds they build and the conditions in which they live becomes a powerful lens through which to consider inequality.

The exhibition explores:

• Women's labour and social inequality

• Intersections of caste and gender

• Economic hardship

• Education and opportunity

• Low pay and insecure employment

• The lack of recognition afforded to women construction workers

• Motherhood and domestic labour

• The meaning of empowerment

• Dignity, equality and the right to a better future

• Ethno-sensory praxis and documentary cinema
  

While women's participation in paid work can represent a form of economic empowerment, Colour amid Concrete asks a more difficult question: what does empowerment mean when women continue to experience low pay, inadequate support, discrimination and, in some cases, abuse?

For Meera Darji, empowerment must extend beyond employment. It must include recognition, dignity, equality and the opportunity to build better lives for women and their families.

About the artist

Meera Darji is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, Senior Lecturer and practice-based researcher at Birmingham City University.

Her films have received awards and have been screened at international film festivals and exhibition spaces. Her research focuses on kino eye and cinema vérité techniques as a means of presenting an inclusive and authentic voice within documentary practice.

Through Colour amid Concrete, Meera hopes to bring greater recognition to the women whose labour remains largely unseen and to encourage audiences to engage with questions of inequality, labour, gender and dignity.

Come and experience the film, photography and installations, and encounter the women behind the concrete.