Sujata Setia’s ‘A Thousand Cuts’ is a powerful and deeply personal artistic project that explores the hidden realities of domestic abuse within South Asian communities in the UK.
What does it take to turn personal trauma into a profound work of art? For Indian-born, British lens-based artist Sujata Setia, the answer lies in vulnerability, resilience, and collaboration.
Last year’s Sony World Photography Awards celebrated her project titled »A Thousand Cuts’ – a deeply intimate exploration of domestic abuse within South Asian culture. The project, which received the top honour in Sony’s Creative category, was brought to life through a partnership with SHEWISE UK, a charity supporting survivors from South Asian and Middle Eastern communities.
Through hauntingly beautiful « wedding style » portraits layered with the unique artistic intervention of making cuts to the images, Setia captures the stories of 21 survivors while drawing from her own lived experiences. Her work not only highlights the silent epidemic of abuse but also challenges cultural norms that perpetuate it.
« Women have been intellectually oppressed for generations, and breaking free from that oppression is incredibly difficult. The silencing runs very deep. Culturally, we are raised to believe that endurance is a strength and that we must bear burdens silently, » she told L’Observatoire de l’Europe Culture.
We sat down with Setia to discuss her process of creating this hauntingly beautiful project and what she hopes it achieves.
L’Observatoire de l’Europe Culture: Tell us more about your project ‘A Thousand Cuts’.
Sujata Setia: ‘A Thousand Cuts’ is a study of domestic abuse within South Asian culture. It is an interdisciplinary work created through interviews with 21 South Asian domestic abuse survivors, all of whom are based here in the UK. The project draws not only from my own personal lived experiences but also from the conversations I’ve had with these survivors. It includes portraits, which are layered with artistic interventions.
When did you start creating this project or developing the idea?
I’ve been a photographer for over a decade, and I believe I’ve always wanted to create this work. As I mentioned, this project stems from my personal lived experiences. I witnessed domestic abuse while growing up, and I feel like everything I’ve done in my artistic career has been leading up to this point.
I truly began working on it in 2019, after the passing of my mother. That was the moment I felt the need to address and bring closure to the trauma I experienced during my childhood. Around 2021 – 2022, I reached out to a UK-based charity called SHEWISE UK, which works specifically with survivors of abuse from South Asia and the Middle East. I shared my idea with them, explaining that I wanted to create a series but wasn’t sure where it would lead because I had never previously worked on narratives of abuse in my art. I also had never collaborated with participants who wished to remain anonymous, which presented a significant challenge. When I started, I didn’t have a clear vision of where this project would go, but it has evolved through that uncertainty
Why do you think a lot of domestic abuse, particularly in South Asia, goes hidden or underreported?
Domestic abuse is, unfortunately, the most widespread crime yet the least spoken about. For instance, the UN statistics stating that one in every three women has experienced domestic abuse is, in reality, just a conjecture – it doesn’t reflect the full extent of the issue. From my personal experiences, I believe this underreporting is due to the immense stigma and shame attached to discussing abuse. Women have been intellectually oppressed for generations, and breaking free from that oppression is incredibly difficult. The silencing runs very deep.
Culturally, we are raised to believe that endurance is a strength and that we must bear burdens silently. There’s also the weight of societal expectations – this « burden of purity » that is levied on women – which makes it even harder to speak out. Every time we consider discussing our abuse, this ingrained belief that we need to hide it stands in the way.
What were the initial steps you took to connect with and understand the survivors?
This project has been in my mind for many years. I grew up witnessing domestic abuse, and I always felt that as an artist, my primary duty is to help break the cycle – if not for everyone, then at least for my daughter.
When I began creating this work, I wanted to make it simple enough for my ten-year-old daughter to understand. I believe it’s through children that we can start these conversations and normalise them. However, I faced a major challenge: I am a portrait photographer, and I like to convey emotions through people’s faces. When I met the survivors through the SHEWISE UK charity, they all expressed a preference not to reveal their identities. Their reasons varied. Some were at a stage in their trauma journey where the pain felt too raw to share publicly. Others felt they had moved past their trauma and didn’t want it associated with their current identity. Some were still entangled in legal battles. Everyone was at a different stage of healing, and this presented a challenge for me as an artist.
To navigate this, I went through several artistic iterations. I began by conducting group interviews with the survivors. I remember one session in a church in Hounslow where we sat holding hands. The only rules were that no one could interrupt or judge anyone else. And I think the conversation went on for a good five hours, and nobody stopped one another. There were tissues everywhere!
Following the group discussions, I sat down one-on-one with each survivor to delve deeper into their stories. I explored their histories, childhoods, and cultural backgrounds, seeking to understand how their upbringing and past experiences shaped the patterns of abuse in their lives.
How did the photography and creative elements take shape?
For the photography component, we decided to stage celebratory photoshoots with each survivor. These shoots carried a sense of duality: they referenced the day they were married – a day of celebration for everyone else but often one of profound loss for them, as it marked the beginning of their lack of choice. At the same time, the photos celebrated their resilience and the fact that they had survived and moved beyond the trauma.
The photoshoots had a vintage aesthetic, using black-and-white film to evoke the feel of old wedding photographs. Survivors were invited to wear what made them feel good about themselves. I would provide those clothes to them also, again, to conceal their identity. After the shoots, we collaboratively chose the images they felt most connected to. And on top of that, images when I’d start making the cuts.
What do the cuts represent?
The commonality I found through the conversation was that every survivor, through their trauma, is completely torn apart from within. This internal tearing, and the way trauma can ripple across generations, came up repeatedly in the interviews. I wanted to capture and convey that sense of being torn apart through the work.
To do this, I took that metaphor of tearing and applied it literally to the prints. I’m not a rich photographer so I printed the images at home on A4 sheets, using my printer. Then, I physically made cuts on the prints with a knife. Making those cuts was a deeply personal and transformative process for me. It allowed me to embody the energy of the perpetrator – to explore what drives someone to cause such harm. This is, after all, the root of the problem. As I made the cuts, I realised the act itself was almost rhythmic, like a form of meditation. I entered a trance-like state, and the process became both unsettling and revealing. Initially, I would have a concept in mind based on the survivor’s life journey. But as I began cutting, the concept would leave me entirely, and the cuts would take on a life of their own. The artwork would transform into something I hadn’t anticipated.
I almost felt like that is what the perpetrator would be experiencing. The exhilaration a perpetrator might feel when injuring someone so deeply. That the joy of injuring someone so deeply is so exhilarating that you keep hurting someone. You keep continuing to hurt somebody until even you don’t realise what that person has become or what you have ended up becoming yourself.
What’s the significance of the red colour that you’ve decided to work with?
The colour red means so much in the South Asian culture. Traditionally, a woman wears red on the first day of her wedding. At the same time, red is also the colour of anger. It is the colour of loss. It is the colour of pain and death. And at the same time, red is the colour of love and rebirth and strength as well.
What was the biggest revelation you found while making this project?
The biggest revelation for me, both as an artist and as a human being, was confronting my own assumptions. I thought that because of my personal experiences, I would naturally approach these stories with an open mind, free of judgment. But during conversations with survivors, I often felt acute anger – why were they allowing this to happen to themselves over and over again? There were moments when I wanted to hold them and shake them, to tell them they were self-sabotaging.
After these conversations, I would step away, realising how much my reactions were tied to my own story. I was telling a story I had lived through my mother, not my own, and each interaction brought back the frustration I felt as a child. Growing up, I desperately wanted to pull my mother out of her relationship, but she couldn’t leave. In those moments with survivors, I often felt as though I was speaking to a reflection of her.
So throughout this process of making this project, has it helped you to process your own story?
Absolutely. So much! I mean from the time I started this work to now, I’m a completely different person. Absolutely. I don’t even recognise that woman I was two and a half or three years ago – someone who was on depression medication and struggling to process her trauma. The passing of my mother was like reopening a can of worms. This project, however, has taught me to step back and look at myself and my trauma as an outsider would – to really examine the patterns in my life and understand how those patterns can be stopped.
What do you hope the impact of this project will be, particularly in raising awareness and encouraging others to speak out about their own trauma?
This project is a small effort, to be honest. As an artist, I’m not overly optimistic about the immediate change that art can bring. There’s no clear, linear pathway between art and societal change really… But even so, small efforts matter, and each of us needs to contribute in whatever way we can.
This work has been shared in exhibitions worldwide, and I’m incredibly grateful to the Sony World Photography Awards for amplifying it. I can’t tell you how many people have interacted with this work and started conversations. Some have even confided in me, saying that viewing the project allowed them to reveal their own stories for the very first time.
That idea of making conversations around domestic abuse such a ghastly, or a scary, or an ugly subject that needs to be removed from society. It is a normal conversation. The more normalised this conversation becomes, the easier it will be for people to get out and talk about it. Hopefully there will be an a long term impact as and when more artists start to speak about this and more people come out and talk about these issues.
