Sheba Chhachhi

Born in 1958 in Harare (Ethiopia)
Lives and works in New Delhi (India)

Sheba Chhachhi studied at Delhi University, Chitrabani, Kolkatta and the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. Installation Artist, activist, photographer and writer, 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. 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 non-formal contexts. She was Townsend Fellow at University of Berkley, 2005 and held the Mario Miranda Chair for Visual Arts at the University of Goa, India in 2015. Chhachhi was awarded the Signature Juror’s Prize for contemporary art in Asia by the Singapore Art Museum, 2011. In 2017, she was honoured with the Prix Thun for Art & Ethics, Switzerland.

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 labour, and often draw on pre-modern thought and visual histories to calibrate an enquiry into the contemporary moment. Chhachhi writes of her work on view at KB17: “Water has become a commodity. Today, we are beleaguered consumers trying to meet our needs in the midst of contamination and scarcity. The video reminds us of water as part of our symbolic, cultural, psychic life. Evoking pleasure, loss, and rejuvenation, the elephant, symbol of wisdom, power, fertility, becomes emblematic of cultural memory, of an eco-philosophy which has been submerged and must be recovered.”