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Zuleikha Chaudhari

Zuleikha-Chaudhari
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First at Khoj
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Bio

Zuleikha Chaudhari is a theatre director and lighting designer – her work takes the form of performances and installations and her ongoing research considers the structures and codes of performance as well the function and processes of the actor as reality and truth production.

Formally she is very interested in the role of the viewer in the performative experience and the tension between looking or watching and doing or acting.

Her current research uses archival documents (texts and photographs) to develop theatrical performances as a way of thinking about the relationship between production of memory, the role of the archive and how that pertains to the retrieval and reliving of an event. The constructed narratives within the works looked at the relationship between personal lived experience and memories and larger historical events and narratives. These works use a combination of reportage, portraiture, documentary, and fiction – the editing, re-interpretation and re-positioning of speculative ideas, opinions, beliefs and anecdotes towards the production of new narratives is central to these investigations about the relationship between history and theatre.

Since 2014 she has been exploring the framework of law as performance, the role of performance in law and the performativity of legal truth-production. Law’s performativity describes a way of forming, of per-forming the world through a certain structure of the use of signs that is always at the same time a procedure and a connection of a (historical) sign to a (new) context. The concept of performativity here describes a mode of doing something to the world.