AN EXHIBITION OF PHOTOGRAPHS

Across The Crossfire - Women in the Conflict Zone

History has demonstrated, time and again, that women, even when they are not combatants themselves, have had to bear in large measure the grievous impacts of conflict and violence. These could range from injury and the loss of close family members to dispossession, displacement and the vulnerabilities and responsibilities that accompany such conditions.

It is against this backdrop that Women's Features Service (WFS) and Women Unlimited-Kali for Women, have brought out a book entitled "˜Across the Crossfire: Women in the Conflict Zone', to be released on December 5, 2012. This work, supported by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), is a compilation of narratives generated by WFS from various zones of conflict in India, written between 2009 and 2011. They focus on the discrete situations of women caught up in insurgencies, wars, riots, situations of civil disorder and natural calamities.

Riveting images from this compilation will be on display in the IIC quadrangle from December 4 to 10, 2012. From a landmine victim in Kashmir struggling to make ends meet to young tribal children living in an orphanage in Raipur, in insurgency-hit Chhattisgarh, to Assamese women who have been forced to call relief camps their home since the last 15 years to the dynamic women health workers, ASHAs, who are spreading a million smiles throughout conflict-prone Odisha, we capture the tragedies and hopes that mark times of conflict.