Sheba Chhachhi

Sheba Chhachhi’s lens-based works investigate contemporary questions about gender, the body, the city, cultural memory, and eco-philosophy through intimate, sensorial encounters. Chhachhi began as an activist and photographer, documenting the women’s movement in India. By the 1990s, she moved to creating collaborative staged photographs, eventually turning to large multimedia installations. Her works retrieve marginal worlds: of women, mendicants, forgotten forms of labor, and often draw on pre-modern thought and visual histories, interweaving the mythic and the social. Created through inter‐subjective processes, the photographs emerge from an invitation to perform the self.

Chhachhi’s work recuperates pre‐modern iconography, myth, and visual traditions to calibrate an inquiry into the contemporary moment. She experiments across the spectrum of durational media and has developed a signature language in creating animated lightboxes. These mobile palimpsests work with a series of translucent and transparent layers where the mythic and the social conjoin to reflect on key concerns of our times.

Born in 1958, in Harar (Ethiopia), Chhachhi studied at Delhi University, Chitrabani, Kolkata, and the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. She lives and works in New Delhi.

Exhibitions and Awards

Chhachhi creates immersive environments, bringing the contemplative into the political, in both site‐specific public art and independent works. She has exhibited widely in India and internationally, including the Gwangju, Taipei, Moscow, Singapore, and Havana biennales; her works are held in significant public and private collections, including Tate Modern, UK, Kiran Nadar Museum, Delhi, BosePacia, New York, Singapore Art Museum, Devi Art Foundation, Delhi, and National Gallery of Modern Art, India. Installation artist, activist, photographer, and writer, she has participated in numerous international biennales and triennials and was Townsend Fellow at University of Berkley, 2005. In 2011, Chhachhi was awarded the Juror’s Prize for contemporary art in Asia by the Singapore Art Museum. In 2017 she was awarded the Prix Thun for Art & Ethics, Switzerland.

Other Work

Chhachhi has published writings, given talks, and conducted workshops, research, and projects relating to women, conflict, urban ecologies, visual culture, and contemporary art practice in both institutional and informal contexts.