‘We are the Ones We’ve been Waiting For’ is a response to the canon of Western liberal
feminist discourse on South Asian bodies. Who gets to tell us what freedom looks like for us,
but us? Removing the role of the photographer as the sole creator of an image and a message,
I invited twelve photographers of South Asian origin, in relation to femininity, to co-create. With a shared peeve for their hypermasculine environments, they crafted a message of bodily
autonomy where we reframe the body as the locus of freedom, and permission as a freedom
practice. During this process of making together we think about what freedom can look like.
Through collective effort, a diverse array of photographs were transmuted into a mixed-media
collage, wheat-pasted as a mural in Karachi in December 2023, as a kaleidoscope of autonomy
and a remedy to the masculinist Pakistani public spaces.