Tejal Shah

Tejal Shah was born in 1979 in Bhilai, India, and currently lives and works in Mumbai. The artist works across various media, including video, performance, installations, and photography. “I have worked with the body as an entity possessing specific gender and sexuality throughout the early stages of my career. My particular interest has always been in focusing on the more circumscribed aspects of the male and female categories, reflecting on what and who could constitute masculinity and femininity. My subjects are often women, transgender, or transsexual individuals who have been marginalized in the history of representation but who present themselves in unlikely poses within the scenarios I construct.”

Regarding the work Back to Front I & II from 2000, the artist describes her relationship with the transgender subject portrayed: “It was the first time for both of us. I sensed your difference, your strangeness. You had never dared to dress up in front of anyone, and I had yet to expose myself to any trans-. When darkness fell and silence enveloped us, hidden from the eyes of the world, you transformed. Crouched in the back of your father's shop, I looked at you in astonishment and wonder. You feared the streets, both crowded and empty. Finally, we walked out together.”

In 2007, the artist resided in an artist residency in Paris and came across the book Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière by the French philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman. “I was immediately captivated by the complex intertwining of the invention of photography and its use in the colonial enterprises of the mid-nineteenth century, as so well analyzed by Malek Alloula in The Colonial Harem, for instance; the 'theatrical' nature of these photographic archives – connecting the model/patient, doctor, photographer, and the post-Renaissance scientific custom that establishes credible authority for them. The archive photographers seem impassive, even humorous at first, but soon reveal the sense of gloom underlying a painful history. Working with dancer and choreographer Marion Perrin, who also appears in some of these photographs, I began to develop a series of self-portraits, including Lethargy, with the aim of recreating some of the images from this archive. By featuring the doctor and the photographer as subjects, they investigate the artist's position in undertaking this role. It was very challenging to express History in these images. After some research, I realized that many images had been taken immediately after shock treatments inflicted on patients to the mouth or on the nerves of the orbits in cases of photophobic hysteria.”