Antariksh: The Space Between

Based in Delhi, Sheba Chhachhi is a photographer and installation artist who has been a consistent chronicler of the women’s movement in India. Born in 1958 in Harar (Ethiopia), she studied at Delhi University and the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. As both photographer and activist, ShebaChhachhi, moved from documentary practice in the early 90’s to developing collaborative, staged photographic portraits with her subjects and since 1993 has exhibited widely in India, Europe, Japan, South America and the U.S.A. She has published writings, given talks and conducted workshops, research and projects relating to women, visual culture and contemporary art practice in India and South Asia.

Her work addresses concerns with transformation, marginality and the play between the mythic and social in the context of gender, body, representation, urban ecologies, violence and visual culture. Simultaneously watcher and protagonist, open and partisan, critical and empathetic, Chhachhi inhabits the space between, refusing conventional binaries between the activist and the artist, the spiritual and the material, the social and the psychic. Much of her practice is concerned with retrieving the abject, the marginal, bringing into the public domain that which is rendered invisible – either through being unseen, unrepresented, or through falsifying forms of visibility. In this presentation, Sheba Chhachhi offers a mapping of an artistic practice marked by shifts and turns, the taking of risks, and continuous experimentation within the social and political context of the last fifteen years, braiding together encounters and conversations of both internal and external realities.

The presentation will be chaired by the cultural theorist, art critic and curator, Nancy Adajania. She has written and lectured extensively on extended sculpture, new media and public art and her theoretical concerns include the effects of mediatic reality on painting, the postcolonial location of video and net-based practices, the politicisation of visual culture and the illusion of democratic performativity produced by contemporary mass media. Her curatorial projects, both in India and abroad, explore a wide range of ideas of the contemporary art world.