Examining Chhachhi’s remarkable oeuvre in all its diversity over the span of four decades, the show includes seven seminal works created since 1997 featuring photographs, photo-video installations, and her signature animated lightboxes. This exhibition brings together the unsparing and often exquisite meditations on critical questions about gendered bodies, subaltern histories, the relationship between humans and the natural world, and eco-philosophy.

Eponymically the title refers to a kinetic sculptural installation - Temporal Twist, which resonates at several levels – the inventions of cultural and personal memory, retold stories, and shared histories. The show presents ‘twists of time’ that lie as much in the conjunction of the works as in the content of each work - a metalogue (from Gregory Bateson's - Steps to an Ecology of Mind,1972).

A space for relational inquiry, a conversation about conversation, thought exercises, and a playful dialectic structure which itself is closely related to the subversive subject matter of the works, the exhibition marks the important place that the artist holds in the lineage of feminist practitioners creating intersections between art, activism and the archive.

In addition, we present the film ‘Moving the City’, 2016, an urban fable, in which Chhachhi's interest in the increased fluidity between private and public space in contemporary cityscapes creates a metaphoric sketch of the negotiations of body and subjectivity that single women in Delhi make as they traverse the city, crossing borders of class, caste and neighbourhood.

Artist Biography:

Sheba Chhachhi is an installation artist/ photographer who investigates questions of gender, eco-philosophy, violence, and visual cultures, with an emphasis on the recuperation of cultural memory. An activist/photographer in the women’s movement in the 1980s, Chhachhi moved on to create intimate, sensorial encounters through large multimedia installations. Her work seeks to bring the contemplative into the political. She has exhibited widely including the Gwangju, Taipei, Moscow, Singapore, and Havana biennales; her works are held in significant public and private collections, including Tate Modern, UK, Kiran Nadar Museum, Delhi, Bose Pacia, New York, Singapore Art Museum, Devi Art Foundation, Delhi and National Gallery of Modern Art, India and Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai. She was awarded the Juror’s Prize for contemporary art in Asia by the Singapore Art Museum in 2011 and, in 2018, the Thun Prize for Art & Ethics. Chhachhi speaks, writes, and teaches in both institutional and non-formal contexts. She lives and works in New Delhi.

The exhibition is curated by Sasha Altaf