Women Walk at Midnight is a global practice of women walking, together, at night on the streets of their cities. The practice started in Delhi in 2016 and has since travelled to many parts of the world. On November 22nd, as part of the Baltic Circle 2025 program, Mallika Taneja wishes to invite Helsinkians to join her on one of such walks.
Women Walk at Midnight is a global practice of women walking, together, at night on the streets of their cities. The practice was initiated in New Delhi in 2016 and has since travelled to many parts of the world. On November 22nd, as part of the Baltic Circle 2025 program, Mallika Taneja, along with partners from Helsinki, invites women from the city to join on the first walk of this practice in Helsinki.
Since 2016, the practice of Women Walk at Midnight has evolved, grown, learnt, fallen on its face and picked itself up again. It has insisted on presenting itself on the streets of different cities – sometimes failing but often succeeding. Over the years, a loose community of walkers and hosts has emerged, often convening around a midnight walk to think, feel, and breathe together.
The politics of walking and the need for it, especially at night, was inspired and informed deeply by the active conversation around women’s safety and lack of by Maya Krishna Rao’s theatre piece Walk, created in the wake of the Nirbhaya gang rape and murder of 2012. In her words: “in the day, at midnight or at 3 in the morning, I [we] will walk.”
We walk, because we can.…in the hope that by walking continuously, we will finally walk into the day that each woman can walk, on the street, alone, at midnight. Everywhere.
Mallika Taneja lives and works out of New Delhi, India. Through performances, installations, and curatorial work, she explores questions of gender, solidarity, pleasure, rest, and remembering. She is particularly interested in exploring political possibilities of performative assembly and the role songs play in drawing/moving and gathering people, places, and things.
Some of her works and collaborative projects include Be Careful, Allegedly, Rest of the Struggle, Zanana ka Zamana, and Sex Chat Room. She won the ZKB Acknowledgment Prize for ‘Be Careful’ in 2015, the ZKB Patronage Prize for ‘Allegedly’ in 2021, and the Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Award for ‘Do You Know This Song?’ in 2024.
Mallika initiated Women Walk at Midnight, a practice of women walking at night time in their cities, in 2016 and has since then been building the practice and leading the Delhi chapter. She has also been initiating and incubating walks and chapters of the practice globally.