logo
Get the Materials
  • Home
  • About
    • highlights
    • thank you
  • Program
    • Curated Spaces
    • Exhibits
    • Films
    • Performers
    • Speakers
  • resources
    • reprint
      • Day 1
      • Day 2
      • Day 3
    • All About Power
    • The Nairobi Principles
    • podcasts
  • Venue
  • Facebook
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • crea
logo
Get the Materials
  • Home
  • About
    • highlights
    • thank you
  • Program
    • Curated Spaces
    • Exhibits
    • Films
    • Performers
    • Speakers
  • resources
    • reprint
      • Day 1
      • Day 2
      • Day 3
    • All About Power
    • The Nairobi Principles
    • podcasts
  • Venue
  • Facebook
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • crea
sheba chhachhi  
Inspired by street toys, popular display objects and nineteenth-century pre-cinematic devices, Chhachhi has developed the animated lightbox, both device and medium, creating a new artistic language. 

This kinetic object uses simple, but ingenious means to build a form of photographic montage created through both still and moving layers. These mobile palimpsests take on a startling dimensionality as a series of translucent and transparent layers merge in and out of each other to create an almost cinematic aesthetic. Further, the movement of the layers within the light box produces a special quality of time, and elicits attentiveness, a sort of contemplative alertness.The images are drawn from a wide range of sources - photographs taken by the artist, spectral satellite data, pre-modern painting, colonial maps – to name a few. These realign photographic indexicality from historical trace to a performative presence that is both dialectical in form and cinematic in effect. Chhachhi slows the viewer down, drawing them into her inquiry into contemporary ecological concerns. 
edible birds
light box images of the exhibition edible birds
Four yogic postures based on birds are invited as protagonists to perform this continuing enquiry into forms of reciprocity between the human and the non-human. The scene is set against a backdrop of satellite imaging of recent ecological disasters in Asia. Yoga has been reduced to a private fitness regime belying its roots in imaginatively and physically inhabiting the mode of knowing/being of non-humans who belong to a shared habitat. The dominant form of relationship with the non-human that remains is one of incorporation: the literal taking of the other into one's body. This incorporation pivots around edibility. Birds are poultry; humans are subject to a kind of hyperphagia. Edible Birds presents a set of fluid conditions of inter-relatedness: between remote sensing imagery and forms of mediation between humans and the rest of the phenomenal world.
CREA 7 Jangpura B, Mathura Road, New Delhi | 125 Maiden Lane, 9th Floor, Suite #C New York | reconference@creaworld.org