Courtesy of the artist
Pranika Koyu’s knits are inspired by Sue Montgomery, a city councillor and borough mayor in Montreal whose colour-coded knitting visualised the fact that men spoke excessively more than women during city council meetings in 2019. Koyu applies a similar principle in her work, documenting the time occupied by various speakers in virtual panel discussions organised during Nepal’s COVID-19 lockdowns. She further incorporates patches that refect a panel's diversity in terms of gender, caste, and ethnicity. Unsurprisingly, women from Indigenous and Dalit backgrounds were often sidelined during such talks. For the artist, it is evident that men from higher castes continue to take up space in public discourses, creating a self-serving echo chamber at the expense of others and their participation.