Sheba Chhachhi

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Sheba Chhachhi is an Ethiopian-born Indian photographer, writer, filmmaker, installation artist, and women’s rights activist based in New Delhi. Her work often centers on women, urban change, memory, and history, and she creates immersive, site-specific installations that bring the contemplative into the political.

Early life and education
Chhachhi was born in 1958 in Harar, Ethiopia, where her father worked for the Indian Army. Her family moved frequently, and they returned to India when she was about three. As a teenager she spent time with folk singers and mystics and later became involved in the feminist movement. She studied at Delhi University, then attended Chitrabani in Kolkata and the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad.

Career and artistic approach
She began in the 1980s with documentary photography, capturing the women’s movement in India and protests in Delhi. Her first international show, Four Women Photographers, opened in London in 1988. Seven Lives in a Dream (1998) marked a shift to collaborative practice with her subjects, leading her to develop multimedia photo-based installations that combine photography, text, sculpture, and found objects. She describes these works as a “perfect form” that merges photography, text, and sculpture.

Her installations explore history, feminine experience, visual culture, urban ecologies, memory, and marginal worlds—bringing together women, mendicants, and forgotten labor, and balancing myth with social realities. She creates immersive environments that connect the contemplative with political concerns, often addressing regional conflicts and displacement.

Selected works and projects
- When the Gun Is Raised, Dialogue Stops (2000), with writer Sonia Jabbar, a project to give voice to Kashmiri women amid violence.
- Ganga’s Daughters: Meetings With Women Ascetics, 1992–2004 (2004), portraits and studies of women sadhus in India.
- Winged Pilgrims: A Chronicle (2007), a multi-part installation with sculptures, lightboxes, and sound about migration and globalization.
- The moving image light box became a signature medium for her, blending still and moving images to create a cinematic feel.
- The Water Diviner (2008) and Black Waters Will Burn (2011), video and installation works reflecting water, urban transformation, and ecology.

Other media and collaborations
Chhachhi contributed to the 1998 documentary Three Women and a Camera about Indian women photographers. She also acted in Sonali Fernando’s 1992 short film Shakti, portraying a woman who recycles rubbish into art.

Collections and exhibitions
Her work is held in major public and private collections, including Tate Modern (London), Kiran Nadar Museum (Delhi), Bose Pacia (New York), Singapore Art Museum, and the National Gallery of Modern Art (New Delhi). Notable solo exhibitions include Agua de Luz (Volte, Mumbai, 2016), Evoking the Pause (Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai, 2011), and Luminarium (Volte, Mumbai, 2011).

Awards
Chhachhi received the Juror’s Prize for Contemporary Art from the Singapore Art Museum in 2011 and the Prix Thun for Art and Ethics in 2017.