Tejal Shah

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Tejal Shah (* 1979 in Bhilai ) is an Indian artist . She uses media such as photography , video and installation and sees her work as positioned feminist and queer .

She studied at RMIT University in Melbourne and now lives and works in Mumbai , India.

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Shah's work is thematically strongly linked to her life and experiences as a lesbian woman in India . She describes herself and her work as feminist , queer and political and created a series of video art works, installations and photographic works, with which she also gained international attention.

This is how her photo series “Women Like Us / I AM” was created in 2003, in which she - like Zanele Muholi in South Africa - approaches gender - nonconforming ways of life. For this, Shah portrayed Indian women who refuse to play the roles given by Indian society . The aim of making these ways of life visible is to clear up and reduce prejudices in order to improve the difficult living conditions of these people in Indian society. Shah says: "Ultimately, people whose gender identities do not simply fit into the prevailing paradigm pay a high, sometimes violent, price for being who they are". Since 2003 Tejal Shah has also been co-curator of “Larzish”, India's first film festival on the topics of sexuality and gender diversity .

In 2004 she released her short documentary “Calcutta Pride March 2004” about India's second Gay Pride parade “Walk on the Rainbow”.

For Documenta 13 in Kassel in 2012, she created the video installation “Between the Waves”, in which she imaginatively approached recent findings in biology and physics. In an artistic utopia of a non-discriminatory science, Shah here developed the concept of “biological exuberance”, which describes deviations from biological forms or phenomena given in nature as productive for the further development of a species. With this, the biologist Bruce Bagemihl conceptualized his discovery of regular same-sex sexual behaviors in a whole range of animal species, which until a few years ago had been suppressed by research. The video installation also made connections to post- porn theories, communication studies and Buddhist philosophy .

Exhibitions (selection)

Solo exhibition:

  • 2013: Between the Waves , Galerie Barbara Gross, Munich
  • 2011: La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse, Montreal

Group exhibitions:

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ tejalshah.in: Info. Retrieved July 9, 2013.
  2. ↑ a b documenta .de: Tejal Shah ( Memento of the original from July 1, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved July 9, 2013. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www3.documenta.de
  3. ↑ ledimages.com/tejal: biography ( memento of the original from October 4, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved July 9, 2013. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / ledimages.com
  4. ^ A b Elke Koepping : Contemporary, Artistic, Queer. In: L-Mag July / August 2012, pp. 18–20, here: p. 19.
  5. ↑ lesbenfilmfestival.de: Movies 2004 C Accessed July 9, 2013.
  6. ↑ ucfilms.in: Calcutta Pride March 2004 Accessed on July 9, 2013.
  7. ^ Between the waves in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung of June 2, 2013, page 35
personal data
SURNAME Shah, Tejal
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Indian photographer, video and installation artist and LGBT activist
DATE OF BIRTH 1979
PLACE OF BIRTH Bhilai , India