Art cannot change things overnight but it can change one’s thoughts. A gallery can only show what artists have done, but imagination can show the way forward, no less than protest.

An ongoing show titled “Woman” at Debovasha, a Calcutta gallery, is a response to our times. Art shows the possibilities of women’s lives, spaces that do not allow violence. “We are marking our time with such images of women,” says Debojyoti Mukhopadhyay of Debovasha.

The city is showing another exhibition on women at Experimenter gallery, and yet another opened at Akar Prakar on December 7. This is not a coincidence.

All the shows happened from earlier conversations at the galleries. But the death of the woman doctor in the city in August compelled them to think in a certain way.

At Debovasha, nine artists, men and women, were chosen for their representation of women. They include eminent artists from Bengal, including Somnath Hore, Ganesh Haloi and Jogen Chowdhury.

Bani Abidi photograph at Experimenteri

Mukhopadhyay mentions Ramananda Bandyopadhyay first. “In his paintings, the women are situated firmly, actively in their world. They are engaged in something. They are the agents of their lives. They are the drivers of civilisation,” Mukhopadhyay says of Bandyopadhyay’s robust female figures.

At the centre of the exhibition, even almost literally, is Reba Hore, a powerhouse artist who drew daily life. She is common to all three exhibitions.

In a stunning piece at the exhibition, held with Debovasha’s own collection at Chitralekha Charitable Trust, an archival space set up by the gallery, an adult woman picks lice from a girl’s head. Yet this mundane act looks electrifying.

“You are awestruck. The movements of pastel and colour are like the turns of classical music, a ballet,” Mukhopadhyay says.

She was married to Somenath Hore.

The exhibition also features Anita Roy Chowdhury, a contemporary of Jogen Chowdhury, who paints nature exuberantly, and women. “Sometimes if you predominantly paint women, it is a statement,” Mukhopadhyay says.

Haloi contributes a startling portrait of a young girl. Sanat Kar, Lalu Prasad Shaw and Haren Das are the other participating artists.

Experimenter has shown Reba Hore extensively in Calcutta. One exhibition on her has just concluded. But her works left lingering questions in the gallerists’ minds.

She was relentless and prolific. And she had emerged out of the shadow of her husband and worked out her own distinct craft. But how did she work? What about leisure?No real discussion aboutwomen’s work is possible without a discussion of her domestic labour.

A wooden sculpture of intertwined figures by Leela Mukherjee at the Akar Prakar gallery.

The gallerist couple, Priyanka and Prateek Raja, were also talking to Berlin-based artist Bani Abidi. Abidi spoke of her discomfiture in an increasingly divided Berlin society. It’s a difficult time everywhere, but these conversations took on more meaning in the context of the doctor’s death.

The idea of a collective event emerged. It was not consciously centred on the idea of gender, “but all voices turned out to be that of women”, says Priyanka. The show is titled “Like Air, I’ll rise”, taking off from Maya Angelou’s words.

Abidi’s photograph series, Seeking Comfort in a German Chair, is about her failed attempts to fit into several chairs, and the effect is spectacular and hilarious. Or so it seems, till you are told the chairs were made by German Bauhaus designers who have been associated with the Nazis. How well you fit into a chair, or not, can be telling.

A corner space is dedicated to four films from the Yugantar Film Collective, a feminist film collective set up in 1980 that emerged from working women’s movements in Maharashtra.

From another space, where Ayesha Sultana’s works are displayed, Moushumi Bhowmik’s powerful voice floats in with her song Swapna Dekhbo Bole. A singer, composer and writer, Bhowmik has for years been working on The Travelling Archive — recordings of songs, stories and sounds from Bangladesh and Bengal. At the exhibition, one can listen to her recordings of women’s voices. The song, she says, rises from the debris of our lives.

The show participants include Bhasha Chakrabarti, Emily Jacir (two of the Palestinian artist’s films are showing), Jacinta Kerketta, Padmini Chettur, Sabika Abbas Naqvi, Sakshi Gupta, Sister Library (a travelling books library) and Samuho Collective, a performance group.

Aparna Roy Baliga finds it strange that Kamala Dasgupta is seen in the photograph of the Calcutta Group, a radical artists’ collective formed in 1943, or in a portrait of her by her husband Pradosh Dasgupta, but her works were hard to come by. Kamala’s works feature in the exhibition at Akar Prakar, which Roy Baliga is curating with Debdutta Gupta.

Roy Baliga addresses this absence of women artists, traditionally, or women, generally, in other places in the art world — Kala Bhavan in Visva-Bharati in the 2000s, when she studied there, hardly had women teachers, she says. This is the feminist critique that becomes the basis of the upcoming exhibition, titled “Of Spaces of Their Own”.

Many artists come together in the show, such as Amrita Sher-Gil, Reba Hore and Meera Mukherjee, as well as Ira Chaudhuri, the brilliant ceramic artist, Kiran Barua and Leela Mukherjee. Many of the artists are still known as the wives of their famous artist husbands.

One again wonders how artists, who are women, work.