This gallery features three artists based in India who have taken up novel approaches to portraiture, informed by feminist critiques of representation. All three—Sheba Chhachhi, Nalini Malani, and Pushpamala N—use the properties of lens-based media to compose, capture, and assemble pictures. Across their practices, they explore visual strategies that underscore the experiences of women as both subjects and makers of images. Each work contains numerous elements, produced over time through different combinations of drawing, staging, and using the camera to bear witness to specific events and histories. This room’s constellation of images mediates and amplifies the numerous facets of the self. As articulated by Chhachhi, “These women are plural, contradictory, multiple. Any one image excludes the other; why should one choose a particular photograph, privilege one over the other?”
Organized by Lucy Gallun, Curator, Department of Photography, and Rattanamol Singh Johal, Assistant Director, International Program, with Abby Hermosilla, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Curatorial Affairs.
