Performance, Temporality, Feminism and Death

This talk explores three of the leading Indian contemporary artist Sheba Chhachhi’s earliest photographic projects: images of the anti-dowry women’s protest movement in Delhi, her subsequent series of so-called “staged portraits” of the movement’s protagonists, and her collaboration with members of the sadhu, or female Hindu renunciate community. I examine each project with special attention to the issue of temporality and argue that Chhachhi’s photographic practice both depends upon and powerfully expresses, modes of alternative temporality that are distinct from the journalistic paradigms within which her work first evolved. Self-performance on the part of Chhachhi’s subjects is key to these distinctive temporalities and evince a mode of “indigenous feminism” that Chhachhi’s oeuvre makes visually manifest.