Volte Gallery and Tulika Books in association with KHOJ organised the launch of the book Arc Silt Dive: The Works of Sheba Chhachhi, edited by Kumkum Sangari. The book comprises essays by Kumkum Sangari, Gayatri Sinha, and Nancy Adajania. It has been designed by Sherna Dastur.
Kumkum Sangari, Gayatri Sinha, and KHOJ Director Pooja Sood were the speakers at this book launch.
Arc Silt Dive is about the work of Sheba Chhachhi; it maps her methods, the modes of address and inquiry in her photographs, animated lightboxes, videos and installations. Editorial anxieties circled around translating the rich immersive experience of multidimensional installations into flat images, prose text and verbal description. Yet this change of medium need not be reductive. Rather, it may be seen as a bound moment in the peripatetic trajectory of installations which are frequently reworked and retested at different sites, and face new formal and contextual dilemmas in each.
The artworks reproduced in this book are not sequenced chronologically; rather, following arcs of connectivity and unexpected conjunction, they are reclustered thematically and visually, re-installed along some of their own overlaps, intersections or displacements. Configural worlds, cracked yet bound in/by affective relationship, the installations convey a sense of recursive reflection in the circulation of images, concepts, concerns, in which little seems to be permanently abandoned and much is reworked, often in technological mediums falling into market-induced obsolescence.