Dipping into the subterranean histories and mythologies of water in contemporary context

Known to be a socially sensitive practitioner, Sheba Chhachhi places the photographic image in space with varied mediums and forms like video, text sound, light and objects. Her innovative artistic language involves the moving image light box that employs a series of both still and moving layers of photographic images, generating an amazing cinematic effect. An important part of her practice is public art interventions, in New Delhi and elsewhere.

Her ‘Water Diviner’ has found her a place among the APB Foundation Signature Art Prize finalists this year. According to her, the installation draws upon the concept of dowsing for the memory of water. It itself becomes an instrument, akin to the rod used by water diviners, to sense the presence of water deep below the earth.

Within this sub-aquatic environment the viewer reads the subterranean histories and mythologies of water murmuring below the crowded streets, congested rooms and ceaseless rivers of traffic. She elaborates in a statement: “Our relationship to water as residents in rapidly changing metropolitan cities is that of dependence, mainly for daily needs. Issues of access, control, distribution, along with the horrific possibilities of scarcity, further make us into desperate consumers, trying to access our share of a decreasingly available commodity.

“On the other hand, ideas about the sacredness of water, its life-giving, purifying, and magical qualities are embedded in local mythologies, even though religious rituals have also become commodified. The rich, abundant, active symbology of water informs the multiple cultures that inhabit the city even today.

"Water, as conceptualized in Indian culture has “constituted a dynamic play across terrestrial and symbolic-celestial networks, ranging from the meteorological to the mytho-poetic, religious and mercantile”. This expanded view needs to be recuperated from mechanical ritual and short-term self interest. Is it possible to recover experiences and memories of water that go beyond consumption?”

Time-based media of the installation, visual as well as auditory, creates an immersive experience within the pool. The work probes the sedimentation of time and memory, to calibrate an imaginary geography of water, and all the viewers-participants are prompted to become a water diviner.