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.
Issues centring on women and impact of urban transformations informs most of Chhachhi's site-specific installations and independent artworks. 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.
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. She was educated at Delhi University after which she attended Chitrabani, Kolkata and the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad.
Major works
Chhachhi started her career in the 1980s with documentary photography, chronicling the women's movement in India. Chhachhi recorded the mass protests in Delhi in the same time period.
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. 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.’ ”
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". 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.