In this season, League of Tenders follows the concepts of Madina Tlostanova, a decolonial thinker of trans-diasporic Circassian-Uzbek origin, as presented in her book Gender Epistemologies and Eurasian Borderlands. Describing how the colonial regime produced the Western “privilege of formulating high theory while the rest had to apply it,” she emphasized “the necessity of formulating a new pluri-versal (as opposed to uni-versal) theory, which would help establish dialogue and volatile connections between gender discourses in various locales.”

The first season takes its title — Her Right — from a film by Saodat Ismailova, which opened the screening series Her Gaze: Moving Image from Central Asia as a part of this season and recalls the political campaign titled Hujum (Attack) undertaken by the Soviet Communist Party to emancipate and unveil women in Uzbekistan. This campaign, co-designed by Zhenotdel — the women’s department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1919–1930), was executed with violent authoritarianism, silencing Indigenous women and erasing their agency, despite manifesting the rhetoric of liberation. Zhenotel was co-founded and led by Alexandra Kollontai, a prominent figure in Western feminism. Recently, her legacy has been rediscovered and revisited by many artists and curators with books published and exhibitions held. However, this wide attention, emphasizing her role in creating platforms for women to engage in political and social life as well as her theoretical work on family and love, lacks the reflection on her support of Soviet colonial politics against Indigenous peoples.

Soviet policies are not unique and Hujum echoes the actions of the French colonial government in Algeria, where a similar agenda of unveiling and emancipation was imposed on Muslim women. “And indeed although the status and rights of Algerian women became part of the colonialist discourse, in practice, little was done to improve their condition,” as researcher Ryme Seferdjeli highlighted in her text The Veil in Colonial Algeria: the Politics of Unveiling Women.

Françoise Vergès, a political scientist and activist raised in Algeria, coined the term ‘civilisational feminism’ to describe the legacy of such colonial politics which still persists. Coupling the language of women’s rights with notions of white supremacy, such liberators successfully ignore race and colonial contexts. Today, such civilizational feminist agendas continue to manifest in various guises, from prescriptive norms imposed on women globally to the justification of military invasions under the banner of women’s and queer liberation.

Challenging these Western and Soviet feminist paradigms, League of Tenders articulates a pluriversal vision of women’s rights. It invites feminist artists, curators, musicians, and collectives from Armenia, Bashqortostan, Kabardino-Balkaria, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Udmurtia, Uzbekistan, and other locales to share their perspectives, often underrepresented on a global scale.

The first season unfolds through three events — Her Gaze, Her Labor, and Her Voice. Each event proposes a decolonial and non-Western perspective on equity and feminism, family and home, politics and history, art and work, knowledge production, and transmission.

Her Gaze: Moving Image from Central Asia, co-curated with Dilda Ramazan and DAVRA Collective, brings together films made by Central Asian women artists, foregrounding the lived experiences of women as mothers, daughters, and (broadly) sisters — within domestic spaces, in the workplace, in their struggles for emancipation, and in making other women visible.

Her Labour unites female artists involved in manual and craft practices such as weaving and embroidery. During four non-public meetings, League of Tenders will mediate the discussion around artistic methods of dealing with the pain of the past, the privilege of intergenerational dialogue, the stigma of ‘decorative’, ‘touristic’ and ‘exotic’ which surrounds this labor and the ways of imagining different futures together.

Her Voice features sound artist Lucia Kagramanyan, who delves into the power of women’s voices as a tool of knowledge production and intergenerational transmission, drawing on the rich oral non-institutionalized musical tradition of Armenian lullabies.

Bringing together these practitioners and thinkers and organizing events across Central Asia and Armenia, in Europe and online, League of Tenders aims to promote decolonial feminist solidarities across various contexts connected by common histories of oppression as well as today’s struggles and experiences of healing. Spending time together, listening to each other's stories and thinking out loud collectively, League of Tenders is looking for ways to bring justice and reimagine other possible futures.