The Hyman Collection is pleased to have acquired a major work by Sujata Setia from her important series "A Thousand Cuts".
We were incredibly moved by this powerful collaborative series in which Sujata Setia and survivors work together to study patterns of domestic abuse within South Asian communities. Each image is accompanied by the survivor's own words and each photograph is painstakingly cut.
Artist Sujata Setia, herself a survivor of domestic abuse, worked in close collaboration with the charity SHEWISE and a group of volunteers who participated in the project. The portraits depict the stories of these survivors as they chose to be seen, and after taking the photographs, Setia used the Indian paper-cutting art form of Sanjhi to maintain the women's anonymity.
Sujata has written that "health cannot be separated from the histories that shape it" and that "domestic abuse is never a singular event; it leaves a direct, trans-generational imprint on both mental and physical health. As a child who grew up in a home where violence was a daily occurrence, I carry that trauma like another limb... Domestic abuse is one of the most widespread global crimes; and yet remains among the least publicly acknowledged health crises. I hope this ... becomes a catalyst for deeper dialogue and scholarship around the interrelation between domestic abuse and health. That is our collective hope."
