Tejal Shah

Born 1979 in Bhilai, India Lives and works in Mumbai, India Tejal Shah works in video, photography, performance and installation, blurring boundaries of subject matter and visual language. Informed by a range of sources from different histories and cultures, including her life experiences and stories from the disenfranchised subcultures, Shah is primarily concerned with issues of identity, politics, gender and sexuality. Shah has been working with the body as a gendered and sexualised entity from the outset of her mature work. Much of which is focused on the social and biological constructs of gender. Protagonists are often women, transgendered or transsexual people who have been marginalised by the historical narrative. Shah’s work both references and transcends otherness. What are you? 2006, explores the malleable language of gender, physically manipulated not only by her chosen subjects, the hirja (transgender) community, but also through the deployment of various forms of media. A two-channel video installation with both screens positioned together {Please clarify, is this side by side? Top to bottom? Face to face? Front to back?}, super-8 is fused with video-style footage, which flows into formal portraiture, woven within found footage not only to reflect an interest in the formal aspects of her work but also replicating the complexities of the hirjas’ life and the ways in which they negotiate and live with their identity. A vortex of emotion and aesthetics - at once celebratory, humorous and fantastical, the work becomes a site of contestation and transformation where the hirja protagonists become the potential artisans of a new vision; the work becomes an emphatic form of activism that proposes a utopian vision of gender. Produced during the artist’s residency in Paris, the video There is always something absent, 2007–08, follows Shah’s interest in the systematic control of women’s sexuality, madness and mental illness. Collaborating with the Paris-based dancer and choreographer Marion Perrin, the work critically deals with the historical and social constructs, such as female hysteria. The narrative focuses on the story of Augustine, a patient at the Salpêtrière Hospital from 1875 to 1880. Through the juxtaposition of images from past and present, which creates an affinity that links us to the women trapped by the ‘hospitality’ of the Salpêtrière, combined with the clinical recitals from Dr. Charcot’s notes, Shah questions accepted historical imaginings and social constructs of gender; it is only when the protagonist escapes, disguised as a man, is she finally allowed to express her feelings. As well as the exploration of gender and sexuality, Shah also deals with the concepts of religion, national identity, self and community in her acclaimed film, I Love My India, 2003. Situated within the conditions of state sponsored genocide against the minority Indian Muslim community in Gujarat (2002), Shah dispels the purported notion of India as one of the world’s largest democracies. Filmed and narrated by the artist in the banal location of a public recreational ground at Nariman Point, Mumbai, combined with the format of an opinion poll, the candid and direct testimonies ranging from loss, apathy, prejudice and ignorance not only question democracy at a local level but also humanity. Within the post-9/11 context, the video asks the viewer to re-examine his own political stance and poses the questions whether it has become more acceptable to commit such acts of violence when the war on terror has been positioned as a universal cause and the bulwark of democracy.   Leila Hasham

Tejal Shah I Love My India, 2003