Sheba Chhachhi’s ‘Water Diviner’ in spotlight

Sheba Chhachhi is currently in spotlight for ‘Water Diviner’ that has found her a place among the APB Foundation Signature Art Prize finalists this year.

Her art practice investigates issues related to gender, violence, ecology and visual culture. It also addresses the concerns and questions of personal and collective memory, transformation, striving to retrieve the marginal, and the interplay between the mythic and social elements. A staunch chronicler of the women's movement in India, the photographer-activist starting with development of collaborative, staged photographic portraits in the early 90's, has gradually moved on to photo-based installations.

Born in 1958 in Harar (Ethiopia), Sheba Chhachhi studied at Delhi University, Chitrabani, Kolkatta and later the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmadabad. Her work has been exhibited widely in several countries, including India, Japan, South America, Europe and the US over almost last two decades. Out of the 130 nominated works for The APB Foundation Signature Art Prize in conjunction with the Singapore Art Museum (SAM), 15 have been chosen by the elite jury panel as Finalists including the one by Sheba Chhachhi.

Providing a backgrounder to it, an essay by Alexander Keefe mentions: “The work evokes a complex way of thinking about the (Yamuna) river - not just as a hydrological problem to be managed, a pollution issue to be dealt with–and also not just as a goddess to be worshiped by devotees oblivious to the way that industrial and commercial development together conspire to destroy her body—but crucially both: somehow bringing these twinned notions into taboo wedlock.

“The images she uses in the work, the dreamlike fragments from paintings painfully juxtaposed with the nightmare filth that the river is forced to carry, pull us into a consideration of the bulldozers waiting to enact the riverfront's latest re-enchantment, its newest triumphalism - transformation into a level ‘village’ for the Commonwealth Games - and the biggest temple in the world cum IMAX theater that presaged its arrival, that bathed the whole endeavor in a preemptive sacred glow. How fitting that the artist conjures such visions in this dark forgotten room, itself the object of so many damp, half-complete re-inscriptions.”