Sheba Chhachhi

Abstract

I have always been drawn to 'odd' women. I feel an affinity, a resonance with women who don't fit the norm - perhaps recognising aspects of myself - and this is reflected in my photographic work. 'Sheba Chhachhi is a photographer, women's rights activist and an installation artist. Based in New Delhi, she has exhibited her works widely in India and internationally, transforming pressing contemporary issues into compelling, evocative works of art. The powerful photographs reproduced here are selected from three major series, co-curated with her subjects. Seven Lives and a Dream spans decades of engagement with, and participation in, the feminist movement. Initiation Chronicle (from Ganga's Daughters) reveals the lives of a group of women sadhus (religious renunciates): each woman in the series subverts conventional assumptions about gender, sexuality, domesticity and female piety. In the 1990s, Chhachhi was one of the first female photographers to photograph women in conflict-ridden Kashmir, resulting in The Green of the Valley is Khaki. Interweaving the mythic and the social, her work, as she puts it, 'is really about opening up a conversation, in the process of creating as well as sharing, to invite people to think about personal, social and public concerns, primarily around feminism and ecology.'