Featured in Harper’s Bazaar India’s 9th Anniversary Issue

Serena Chopra is featured in the March 2018 issue of Harper’s Bazaar India’s 9th anniversary issue, which spotlights the ways women are taking control of  global conversations about women.

Chopra shared her perspective on voice, trust and courage in activism:

 As an artist, I am always in the process and practice of listening. Lately, with recent movements and affirmations of female and queer bodies and voices in public spaces, it has become important for me to also recognize my duty, as a woman who has nurtured space for her voice, to speak into the struggle something nurturing, empowering and affirmative—something worthy of listening. Often these notes are chaotic—cacophony into cacophony—but I trust that landing in other’s hearts, minds, bodies, they will begin to arrange themselves toward sense—women and other oppressed bodies will begin to re-imagine ourselves as the future and not secondary to it.

            In this image, I find myself, like many other women, at the threshold—between the interior and exterior, the self and the world, love and rage, vision and re-vision, past and subjunctive tenses, the fragile orders of institutions and the chaotic momentums of change. This ambitious movement over the threshold is depicted in my hair, which follows and trails me in all my moments, holds the winds that rustle me, echoes the gestures that I manifest, transforms in the waters that refresh it; the daylight exposes the vulnerability of my face—one’s vulnerability in having to face the world and the light, our mortality in the face of it all. In the image I am behind an open window, thinking of Jean-Paul Sartre: “There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.” And I recognize that progress is not graceful or lovely—it is territory, and women and marginalized folks must claim it as our own.