The Office for... Radical Melancholy (with Sheba Chhachhi & Dora García)

Sheba Chhachhi – who is in Norway for the first time, to participate in the Hannah Ryggen Triennial – is one of India’s most important contemporary artists. Her work spans iconic documentary photography of the Indian women’s movement in the 1980s to more recent multimedia and kinetic works.

For this event at Melahuset, Chhachi will give a short introduction to her work followed by a conversation with the Oslo-based Dora García. While their practices are very different, Chhachhi and García share deep histories of engagement with activism and political struggles in their work, particularly in relation to women’s rights. In this conversation they will explore points of intersection and difference in their previous work, as well as how to meet the challenges of making work in the current moment.

Sheba Chhachhi’s work 'When The Gun Is Raised, Dialogue Stops...': Women's Voices From The Kashmir Valley (2000), made in collaboration with Sonia Jabbar, is on display as part of the Hannah Ryggen Triennial in Trondheim from 4 April until 31 August 2025.

‘The Office for…’ is a new series of OCA events exploring what might be possible if the criteria of ‘contemporary art’ are displaced, temporarily, by alternative frameworks. 

Sheba Chhachhi’s lens-based works investigate contemporary questions about gender, the body, the city, cultural memory and eco-philosophy, through intimate, sensorial encounters. Chhachhi began as an activist and photographer, documenting the women’s movement in India. By the 1990s, she moved to creating collaborative staged photographs, eventually turning to large multimedia installations. Her works retrieve marginal worlds: of women, mendicants, forgotten forms of labour, and often draw on pre-modern thought and visual histories, interweaving the mythic and the social. Chhachhi has exhibited widely in India, and internationally, her works are held in significant public and private collections, including MoMa, New York, Tate Modern, UK, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, National Gallery of Modern Art, India, amongst many others. She was awarded the Juror’s Prize for contemporary art in Asia by the Singapore Art Museum in 2011 and in 2018 the Thun Prize for Art & Ethics. She lives and works in New Delhi.

Dora García has developed works on the GDR political police (the film "Rooms, Conversations", 24', 2006, first presented at GfZK, Leipzig, Germany), on the comedian Lenny Bruce ("Just because everything is different... Lenny Bruce in Sydney”, one-time performance, Sydney Biennale, 2008) or on the rhizomatic associations of antipsychiatry ("Mad Marginal" book series since 2010, and "The Deviant Majority", film, 34', 2010, part of her extended performance project "The Inadequate", first presented at her solo in the Spanish Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale). She has used classical TV formats to research Germany's most recent history ("Die Klau Mich Show", Documenta13, 2012), frequented Finnegans Wake reading groups ("The Joycean Society", HD film, 53', 2013), created meeting points for voice hearers ("The Hearing Voices Café", since 2014) and researched the crossover between performance and psychoanalysis ("The Sinthome Score", 2013, first presented in Kunsthaus Bregenz, then in the international exhibition 56th Venice Biennale; and "Segunda Vez", HD film, 90', 2018). She is currently concluding her film project "Amor Rojo", on Marxist feminist Alexandra Kollontai and the impact of her legacy on Third-World, intersectional feminism, and starting a new film project, "END", on the intersection of climate catastrophe, human memory, and female voice.