Sheba Chhachhi (born 1958), is an Ethiopian-born Indian photographer, women's rights activist, writer, filmmaker, and installation artist.
[1][2] Issues centring on women and impact of urban transformations informs most of Chhachhi's site-specific installations and independent artworks.
[7] Her first international exhibition was titled, Four Women Photographers that opened at Horizon Gallery, London in 1988 as a part of the Spectrum Photography Festival.
[2][5] These multimedia installations explores the questions of history, the feminine experience, visual culture, urban ecologies, personal and collective memory, and retrieves marginal worlds: of women, mendicants, and forgotten forms of labour and the play between the mythic and social.
[2][10] Her photo installation, 'When the Gun Is Raised, Dialogue Stops', a collaborative effort with writer Sonia Jabbar attempts to create a "third space" in which the voice of women of Kashmir can be heard over the violence that plagues the region.
Chhachhi and Sonia Jabbar made numerous visits to Kashmir and the refugee camps to "bring the human back into the discourse" that is otherwise blurred out in the violence.
A multi-part installation including sculptures, lightboxes, and a recorded soundtrack that present various iconographies like birds, landscapes, and robed figures articulates the language of migration and a response to globalization.
With a series of imaginary landscapes and digital props interspersed with references from Indian sculpture, Persian/ Mughal miniature, Chinese brush painting and documentary photography shown through a moving image light box, the work went on to be exhibited in many other galleries elsewhere.