"The complexity of meanings thus produced by interpenetrating forms and levels of reality is, quite literally, incredible. Such things do not happen in the natural world. And yet we are impressed by the illusion that they do; that this cannot be happening, but is." (1)
"Ganga's Daughters: meetings with women ascetics 1992 – 2002 is the title that the photographer/artist Sheba Chhachhi has given to an expansive body of images. Chhachhi's artistic practice, going back more than two decades, encompasses journalistic reportage, documentary constructions, activist propaganda, poignantly personal portraiture, multi-media theatrics, and even revelatory exegesis. All of these methods of expression weave in and through "Ganga's Daughters," but for the sake of brevity my focus is on the still photographs, both black-and-white and in color, that Chhachhi brings together under this rubric.
The subject is Indian women of a devoutly committed spiritual practice, one that is both orthodox and iconoclastic, knowledgeable of parameters yet also defiant of rigidity. Operative labels to understand the choices these women have made in their lives (such as Hinduism, renunciates, monks, Shaivites) are useful only up to a point, for their actions and beliefs chafe against the easily codified definitions of such subjects, challenging labels themselves. Chhachhi's interest in her subjects stems from commitments personal, political, philosophical and spiritual; enabling an elastic approach and resulting in a startlingly diverse array of pictures. Contradictions and complexities were encountered along the way, making "Ganga's Daughters" only more potent as art, courting controversy and unintimidated by the unresolved.
The series began with a group of pictures shot, almost naively, in Ahmedabad in 1979. Subhadra is a woman encountered by Chhachhi when she was a student and these earliest photos have the feeling of notes for a future project, something to return to when both experience and study would allow the artist to more properly ascertain the importance of her project. Subhadra's consciousness of the camera verges on defiance and Chhachhi's evidence of their meeting has the raw energy of photographs of spiritualist mediums from the late 19th Century, abetted by happenstance compositions and an unembellished printing technique.
Years later Chhachhi was able to pick up this thread and explore her subjects in depth and with finesse. The editing and structuring of the pictures for exhibition follows closely the circumstances of their making yet Chhachhi also allows the photos to disconnect from their over-arching narrative to function as phantasms of moments both incandescent and intensely visual. The effect is more akin to abstract painting, in that something is functioning both theoretically and materially, breaching dialectical conventions while mirroring and magnifying its subjects.
One part of "Ganga's Daughters" is a rogue's gallery of larger-than-life portraits. Nine women confront the photographer and acknowledge their collaboration in the construction of their representations, much as their choices of hairstyles and clothing reflect their spiritual paths. The gaze is direct, postures deliberate, reminiscent of genres of self presentation in bazaar studio photography. Taken as a whole, this set of portraits emphasizes individual personalities over community, willful idiosyncrasies over collective homogeneity. Most recently, for an exhibition in Paris, Chhachhi has gathered these portraits around the centerpiece of a short animation video, using found images from the early 1900's, a spectral figure that floats vertically, posting spiritual transubstantiation against the magic of technological entrapment. The 'yogini' posits a self aware, almost hiearatic performance of spiritual power which disrupts and questions the self conscious nature of the more contemporary portraits. As in other sculpture and installation works, Chhachhi reclaims primitive techniques of reproduction to empower the disenfranchised who may not have access to that which is cutting-edge or state-of-the-art.
Certainly the most prodigious part of "Ganga's Daughters" is a group of some thirty black-and-white photographs christened "Initiations." This series documents the activities of a three day process culminating in a single day when a group of women convened as part of a very much larger gathering and gleaned their own pointedly personal experience from it. Chhachhi's camera follows them through this collective ritual, from preparation to denouement, yet documents each step almost abstractly, seeing each moment with fresh eyes, as if "condensed as a poetic text."
My own personal interest in the "Initiations" is how they dovetail, seemingly unconsciously, with other genres of photography; photojournalism, of course, but also fashion photography and the documentation of theatrical events. The photographs present a found scenario as if unmoored from its context and I am reminded of similar spectacles that occur in other cultures, namely the Butoh school of performance art in Japan or the haute-couture runway presentations staged by the fashion designer John Galliano in Paris. My point being that radical subcultures seem to exist in all societies (and Chhachhi's women are very much a minority subculture within the larger scheme of orthodox Hinduism in India today) and seem to function as a sort-of pressure release so that the mainstream status quo may remain undisturbed. What the "Initiation" photographs call into question are our own closely guarded parameters used to understand such subcultures (positing "avant-garde vs. traditional" or "radical vs. conservative") and the exceptions that may obviate such binary paradigms. Here is extreme radicality within the structure of conservatism, a traditionalism that may appear to be avant-garde to outsiders.
As a group, the photographs brought together as "Ganga's Daughters" make an attempt at portraiture both individual and collective, across wide expanses of time and with little regard to place (though Chhachhi usually includes the names of towns in individual titles there are no long distance shots of landscape or architecture to properly locate these women). The actions captured could be taking place today or five hundred years ago; these women seem both intimately knowable and hypothetically mythic. With many of the images, Chhachhi has succeeded in creating a picture as densely layered as an epic novel, where "harmony, facility and simplicity stand amid dissonance, difficulty and complexity." The photographs stand as not only art objects but also as barometers of living history, psychic potential and the records of marvelously realized lives.
from Describing Matisse by John Elderfield; from the catalog of the exhibition "Henri Matisse: A Retrospective"; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; September 1992 to January 1993. All subsequent quotes are from the same.
"Once upon a time, or so the story goes, there lived an old fisherman on the wretched riverbanks in the shadow of the palace of the Shah. A lucky day was one where he caught a tiny fish or two. Even back in those days, this type of patient desperation attracted gawkers--as it does now, gentle readers--in this case in the form of an immense, iridescent bird—the legendary Kaha, as even the fisherman knew from a glance--moved to translucent, crystalline tears by the fisherman's pathetic quotidian routine..."
"Two decades ago, photographer Sheba Chhachhi came across extraordinary poetry by women
ascetics dating back to ancient and medieval India, and it changed her life. The sixth century BC
poetry of the married Brahmin Mutta from Bihar who became a Buddhist nun, or the twelfth century
Kannada poetry of rebel, mystic and poet Akka Mahadevi, among others, gave her a glimpse of a
universe in which these women had broken free of all social mores and feminine identity to celebrate
their individual relationship with the metaphysical..."
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