Delhi University, Delhi and National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad
Knownfor
Photography and Contemporary Art
Awards
Prix Thun for Art and Ethics, Switzerland (2017), Juror’s Prize for contemporary art in Asia by the Singapore Art Museum (2011)
Sheba Chhachhi is a photographer, women's rights activist, writer, film-maker and an installation artist. She is based in New Delhi and has exhibited her works widely in India and internationally.[1][2]
Issues centring on women and impact of urban transformations informs most of Chhachhi's site-specific installations and independent artworks.[3] Chacchhi has had her work exhibited in 9 solo gallery shows in 18 countries, her work has been sold in 4 auctions. She has also been a part of 5 Special Projects and published in 5 Museum/ Public collections. In 2011, she was awarded the Juror's Prize for Contemporary Art by the Singapore Art Museum and in 2017, she received the prestigious Prix Thun for Art and Ethics.[4]
Early life and education
Chhachhi was born in 1958 in Harar, Ethiopia where her father was stationed by the Indian Army and returned to India at the age of 3 years. The family frequently moved from one place to the other due to her father's job. She recalls of her teen years, "I spent some of my teen years hanging out with folksingers and mystics," before getting involved with the feminist movement.[5] She was educated at Delhi University after which she attended Chitrabani, Kolkata and the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad.[1][6]
Major works
Chhachhi started her career in the 1980s with documentary photography, chronicling the women's movement in India.[1][2] Chhachhi recorded the mass protests in Delhi in the same time period.[7]
Her first international exhibition was titled, Four Women Photographers that opened at Horizon Gallery, London in 1988 as a part of the Spectrum Photography Festival.[8]Seven Lives in a Dream (1998) was the first of a series of close collaborations with the subjects of her art. In an interview with ArtAsiaPacific in 2011 she says, ”It shifted my mode of practice, this inter-subjectivity where the subject and photographer create together. In a way, that was my movement towards ‘art.’ ” [9]
She further reinvented her mode of art practice by moving on to photo based installations making use of photographs, text, sculpture, found objects which she calls, "the perfect form because it brought photography, text, and sculpture together".[2][5] These multimedia installations explores the questions of history, the feminine experience, visual culture, urban ecologies, personal and collective memory, and retrieves marginal worlds: of women, mendicants, and forgotten forms of labour and the play between the mythic and social. Chhachhi creates immersive environments, bringing the contemplative into the political in both site-specific public art and independent works.[2][10]
Her photo installation, 'When the Gun Is Raised, Dialogue Stops', a collaborative effort with writer Sonia Jabbar attempts to create a "third space" in which the voice of women of Kashmir can be heard over the violence that plagues the region.[5] It opened as a solo exhibition in India Habitat center, New Delhi in 2000. Chhachhi and Sonia Jabbar made numerous visits to Kashmir and the refugee camps to "bring the human back into the discourse" that is otherwise blurred out in the violence.[5] In 2004, Chhachhi came up with a series of portraits of women ascetics in India. Titled 'Ganga's Daughters: Meetings With Women Ascetics, 1992-2004' it was exhibited in Nature Morte, New Delhi.[5][11] She spent more than a decade in getting to know these women sadhus and documenting their lives. She was fascinated with the poetry of women ascetics dating back to ancient and medieval India and was introduced to a world in which these women broke free of codified confines of the social order. And thus, she closely followed the women ascetics of North and East India and the result was 'Ganga's Daughters'. She explains, "They are not wives, they are not mothers, they are not daughters. They reinvent themselves as individual beings…. The self-definition is in relation to the metaphysical, and not the social."[5] Her work, 'Winged Pilgrims: A Chronicle' was hosted by Bose Pacia gallery, New York City in 2007. A multi-part installation including sculptures, lightboxes, and a recorded soundtrack that present various iconographies like birds, landscapes, and robed figures articulates the language of migration and a response to globalization. With a series of imaginary landscapes and digital props interspersed with references from Indian sculpture, Persian/ Mughal miniature, Chinese brush painting and documentary photography shown through a moving image light box, the work went on to be exhibited in many other galleries elsewhere."[2] The moving image light box (which she uses in her later works as well), that Chhachhi developed as a new artistic medium, uses a series of still and moving layers of photographic images to almost cinematic effect.[10] She expounds on the work, "This work configures a spatial, temporal and conceptual field within which the movement of ideas, objects, forms across Asia - with China and India as significant nodes - is articulated through three key elements that are simultaneously material and metaphoric: Birds, the robes of Buddhist Pilgrims and the 'Plasma Action' Electronic T.V. toy."[2]
Her investigations with globalisation and its effects on urban transformations continued further with video installation 'The Water Diviner' (2008) hosted by Volte, New Delhi and the installation 'Black Waters Will Burn' (2011).[3][12] She regards the former as her favorite work till date.[3] She describes that in the sacred text of 'Yamunashtak hymn', Yamuna River is described as a beautiful, sensual woman. But in actuality, Chhachhi perceives it as a wounded female form.[9]
Sheba Chhachhi during the Hans Ulrich Obrist Khoj Marathon, 2011.
Chhachhi was also a part of the 1998 documentary, 'Three Women and a Camera' directed by Sabina Gadhioke, about three women photographers in India, Sheba Chhachhi, Dayanita Singh and Homai Vyarawalla.[13] She also acted in Sonali Fernando's 1992 short film, 'Shakti' as a creative woman who recycles rubbish around her into works of art.[14]
Chhachhi's work encompasses documentary photography, installation, video, and new media, creating immersive environments and bringing the contemplative into the political in both site-specific public art and independent works. Her works are held in significant public and private collections, including the Tate Modern, London; Kiran Nadar Museum, Delhi; Bose Pacia, New York; the Singapore Art Museum; and National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.[15]
Recent Exhibitions
Chhachhi's recent solo exhibitions include Agua de Luz, Volte Gallery, Mumbai (2016); Evoking the Pause, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai (2011); and Luminarium, Volte Gallery Mumbai (2011).
Her group shows include Part Narratives, Bikaner House, New Delhi, and Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum (2017)
50:50: Photography to Digital Imaging and Back, Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Kolkata (2017)
Seven Lives & A Dream: Citizen, Tate Modern, London (2016–17)
Precariously Yours, National Museum of World Cultures, Museum of Ethnology, Leiden, the Netherlands (2016)
The Eye and the Mind: New Interventions in Contemporary Art, Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China Art Museum, Shanghai, Minsheng Art Museum, Beijing, and National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi (2015)
Locust Time, Chandigarh Museum of Art (2014); Water, Europalia Festival, Grand Curtis Museum, Liege, Belgium (2013)
Everywhere But Now, 4th Thessaloniki Biennale, Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Greece (2013)
Record/Resist: Zones of Contact, Kiran Nadar Museum, Noida, India (2013)
The Water Diviner: Difficult Loves, Kiran Nadar Museum, Saket, New Delhi (2013)
Chimera: The Collectors’ Show, Singapore Art Museum (2012).[15]
Related Research Articles
Dayanita Singh is an Indian photographer whose primary format is the book. She has published fourteen books.
Arpita Singh is an Indian artist. Known to be a figurative artist and a modernist, her canvases have both a story line and a carnival of images arranged in a curiously subversive manner. Her artistic approach can be described as an expedition without destination. Her work reflects her background. She brings her inner vision of emotions to the art inspired by her own background and what she sees around the society that mainly affects women. Her works also include traditional Indian art forms and aesthetics, like miniaturist painting and different forms of folk art, employing them in her work regularly.
Bharti Kher is a contemporary artist. In a career spanning nearly three decades, she has worked across painting, sculpture and installation. Throughout her practice she has displayed an unwavering relationship with the body, its narratives, and the nature of things. Inspired by a wide range of sources and making practices, she employs the readymade in wide arc of meaning and transformation. Kher's works thus appear to move through time, using reference as a counterpoint and contradiction as a visual tool.
Pushpamala N. is a photo and visual artist based in Bangalore, India.
Sonia Khurana is an Indian artist. She works with lens-based media: photo, video, and the moving image, as well as performance, text, drawing, sound, music, voice, and installation.
Ranjani Shettar was born in 1977 in Bangalore, India. She is a visual artist, who is known for her large-scale sculptural installations. She currently lives and works in Karnataka, India.
Madhusudhanan the coastal district of Alappuzha, Kerala, India, is an Indian film maker and artist, also known as K. M. Madhusudhanan. His debut feature film, Bioscope has received many awards. He is working with different media in art, including sculpture, printmaking installation art and film.
Gayatri Sinha is an art critic and curator based in New Delhi, India. Her primary areas of research are around the structures of gender and iconography, media, economics and social history. She founded Critical Collective, a forum for thinking about conceptual frames within art history and practice in contemporary India.
Rummana Hussain (1952–1999) was an artist and one of the pioneers of conceptual art, installation, and politically engaged art in India.
L.N.Tallur is an Indian born International visual artist.
Anita Dube is an Indian contemporary artist whose work has been widely exhibited in India.
Sheela Gowda is a contemporary artist living and working in Bangalore. Gowda studied painting at Ken School of Art, Bangalore, India (1979) pursued a postgraduate diploma at Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, India (1982), and a MA in painting from the Royal College of Art in London in 1986. Trained as a painter Gowda expanded her practice into sculpture and installation employing a diversity of material like human hair, cow-dung, incense and kumkuma powder. She is known for her 'process-orientated' work, often inspired by the everyday labor experiences of marginalized people in India. Her work is associated with postminimalism drawing from ritualistic associations. Her early oils with pensive girls in nature were influenced by her mentor K. G. Subramanyan, and later ones by Nalini Malani towards a somewhat expressionistic direction depicting a middle class chaos and tensions underplayed by coarse eroticism. She is the recipient of the 2019 Maria Lassnig Prize.
Aditya Pande is an Indian contemporary artist. His technique often involves a layering of surfaces along with mixed, diverse media ranging from vector drawing, digital photography, ink, acrylic paint to tinsel. His work combines the skills of drawing and printmaking with photography and painting.
Nalini Malani is a contemporary Indian artist widely acknowledged to be among the country's first generation of video artists. She works with several mediums which include theater, videos, installations along with mixed media paintings and drawings. The subjects of her creations are deeply influenced by her experience of migration in the aftermath of the partition of India. Subsequently, pressing feminist issues have also become a part of her creative output. Malani has evolved a visual language that is iconic, moving from stop motion, erasure animations, reverse paintings and most recently to digital animations, where she draws directly with her finger onto a tablet.
The Gallery Soulflower is an art gallery in Thailand created and managed by Soulflower and founded by Amit Sarda and Natasha Tuli. Since 2007 they have been promoting Indian art and it serves as a platform for Indian contemporary artists to present their individual art. The gallery is housed within the Silom Galleria and organizes 4-6 exhibitions annually, by established and emerging Indian artists from all over the country, as well as foreign artists. Works on display range from painting, sculpture, photography, installations, to new media and conceptual-based art.
Gauri Gill is an Indian contemporary photographer who lives in New Delhi. She has been called "one of India's most respected photographers" by the New York Times and one of "the most thoughtful photographers active in India today" in The Wire. In 2011 Gill was awarded the Grange Prize, Canada's most prestigious contemporary photography award. The jury said her works "often address ordinary heroism within challenging environments depicting the artist's often-intimate relationships with her subjects with a documentary spirit and a human concern over issues of survival."
Bani Abidi is a Pakistani artist working with video, photography and drawing. She studied visual arts at the National College of Arts in Lahore and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2011, she was invited for the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin program, and since then has been residing in Berlin.
Vibha Galhotra, born 1978 is an Indian conceptual artist based in New Delhi. Her work includes large-scale installations, sculptures, drawings, films that explore themes of ecological and environmental concerns. Her works address the shifting topography of the world under the impact of globalization and growth. She sees herself as being part of the restructuring of culture, society and geography – of New Delhi, and the world.
The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) is a private modern and contemporary art museum with locations in New Delhi and Noida. Established in 2010, it is India's first private museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art. The core collection of the institution comprises post-independence 20th century painters, but the museum holds exhibits of younger, contemporary artists as well. It is a multi faceted initiative, that helps promote art in public spheres and encourages art appreciation with an active collaboration between artists, schools and the public.
Yamini Nayar is a visual artist working between New York and Delhi. Her work is part of the collection of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Saatchi Collection, Queensland Art Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the US Department of State Art in Embassies collection.
1 2 "Sheba Chhachhi". khojworkshop.org. KHOJ, International Artists' Association. Archived from the original on 13 December 2013. Retrieved 10 December 2013.
↑ Padmanabhan, Chitra (30 October 2004). "Wild Mothers". Tehelka. Retrieved 11 December 2013.
↑ "Sheba Chhachhi". lisemckean.org. Lise McKean. Retrieved 11 December 2013.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
