Lecture
Lost Bodies: The mythic, the material and the everyday
State of Nature in India - with Sheba Chhachi
A feminist reading of the feminine mythology of ‘Nature’ in Indian cultures, the talk focuses on the entanglement of cultural and symbolic regimes with our current ecological conditions.
Pre-modern knowledge systems can be excavated to yield enlightened ecological thinking, such as multi-species co-being, plant and tree sentience, bio diversity, co- dependence.
However, the idealisation of mythic figures like Prakriti, Mother Earth, the River Goddesses, for example, seems to produce rather than prevent dereliction. What is significance of this rupture between the ideal and the material, the deity and her body? Are we too, losing our bodies?
About Sheba Chhachi
Sheba Chhachhi is an artist, photographer and thinker who investigates questions of gender, eco-philosophy, violence and visual cultures, with emphasis on the recuperation of cultural memory. As activist/photographer in the women’s movement in the 1980s, Chhachi moved on to create intimate, sensorial encounters through large multimedia installations. Her work interweaves the mythic and the social, pre-modern thought and contemporary concerns, bringing 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 NadarMuseum, Delhi, BosePacia, New York , Singapore Art Museum , Devi Art Foundation, Delhi and National Gallery of Modern Art, India. Chhachi speaks, writes and teaches in both institutional and non -formal contexts. She lives and works in New Delhi.