My name is Sheba, Sheba Chhachhi
I'm an artist, writer, thinker and an activist
I live and work in Delhi which is a complex, chaotic and very vital place to live
Today my practice actually is not medium specific but engages with particular
social and public issues, primarily feminism and ecology
It's a desire to offer an alternative imaginary
I started, unusually, in the darkroom
I found the whole process absolutely magical
From there on, I started photographing with a borrowed camera
because I didn't have the money to have my own camera
and my very first images were of a woman who lived in a kind of
back veranda of a temple that I used to pass every day on the way to Design School
In a way it was a precursor to my practice which is not at all a kind of
parachuting into a situation making images and leaving
In the early years of
the women's movement, I got very passionately involved and was
photographing, recording, as well as campaigning and literally shouting
slogans one moment and pointing the camera the next
They were not so many women photographers at the time
'Seven Lives in a Dream', the making of the stage portraits is a significant moment
I was profoundly moved by what I saw by the women I met
The stage photo gave me an opportunity to alter the balance of power somewhat
I worked with
seven women asking each one of them to develop with me an image that she felt
would tell her story.
She would select a place
a posture, a gaz,e props, objects so we created a kind of missile send
I see it as that movement; a point of critical transaction in my practice from the
documentary to the creation of art
So my first movement towards that was to take
photographs off the walls
I printed transparent images which were
layered across the space
I also combined it with other material, with historical images,
with sculptural elements etc.
Working with installation is something that asks you to be extremely rigorous with yourself
It's a very flexible, very elastic form
What I seek to do is
create a kind of embodied viewing where the sensorium of the participant or the
viewer participant is engaged, is involved in what is happening
We are in a kind of period where we are inundated with images, with sounds
And I do believe
that the kind of crisis we're facing, and we are in deep crisis environmentally
and, I think, socially. It's a time of great violence, violence between
people, violence between humans and nature
One thing that makes me feel that it's worth continuing to 'speak', in the sense
of making work, is to offer constantly the possibility of other ways of seeing
These are often drawn from history, they are older epistemologies, older knowledge systems
The work really is about opening up a conversation and trying to invite
people to think about things
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