Vrinda Suneja: Empowered women should empower women

A practice to make working wonderful for women
Being a female entrepreneur, one simple but crucial practice that Pulp Society would undertake to make the workplace better for women would be to provide them with paid menstrual leaves. According to me, this is the need of the hour in the workplaces around the world today.

Being a woman myself, I know how difficult it can be at times to constantly be on the move at work while dealing with menstrual pain. I’d like to believe Pulp Society is the first to take such a step for our female employees. This is also a concrete step towards eliminating the stigma around period.

If you were to start again
One thing I would like to do differently is to be conscious about our values and work culture. We ran things as if we have learned them in our previous companies, and the result was a classic command-and-control system with a variety of leadership styles. This was a bit disorganised. A work culture began to emerge eventually, but it was chaotic. We didn't really agree on the values we wanted to put as founders, which made making decisions difficult because we didn't have a mutual understanding to direct us.

Most difficult moment for you
The most challenging moment for us was the launch of our gallery just before the pandemic. It was a major setback, and I found myself redoing our entire business model. When the lockdown was first announced, I woke up to the reality that I would not be able to walk down the Pulp Society galleries, or exhibitions for a while. At this moment, I saw the need for new approaches and digital turn of art.

We finally came up with an online program, This is (now) online, where 78 artists, illustrators, writers and first-time makers collaborated in a unique digital programme to make 16 zines. As an attempt to combat the loneliness and creative isolation resulting from the lockdown, Pulp Society x TIRAF created two digital games — Exquizine and Blind Date.

With an aim to raise Rs 2,00,000 for the people suffering the most during the ongoing pandemic and associated lockdowns, we were selling a total of 20 editions of each zine against the receipt of donations made to an organisation of the buyer’s choice on covid-relief.in. We have again come up with a new project called The Print Out, a series of commissioned artworks, to print out and experience at home. It contains five ‘packets’ of work each prepared by the artists, which can be downloaded, printed and physically engaged with. 

One mantra for every new woman employee
One mantra that would apply to every woman employee at Pulp Society, would be ‘empowered women empower women’. In today’s world, where women continue to face disparity in terms of wages and gender discrimination, it is imperative that women lift other women. I find it disheartening when I see women not supporting other women. When women come together, we can truly achieve great things. 

One underestimated technology with a great future
Well, Pulp Society is a contemporary art gallery and workshop space with a focus on printmaking and experimental work on paper. We work with serigraphs at the moment. We hand pull prints using silk screens. I am not sure about the other printers, but printmaking, like painting in its early days, has always been a bit of a stepchild in the grander context of the fine art.

Some consider it a reproductive process that does not produce “original” artwork. Simply put, this is an uninformed mentality. We started pulp studio to start a dialogue around printmaking to educate and celebrate designers, illustrators, and collectives who are still using conventional print methods to create contemporary works. I believe printmaking has started to regain its status as the ‘democratic medium’ it was once known for.