Tejal Shah graduated with a BA in photography from RMIT, Melbourne, spent a year as an exchange student at The Art Institute of Chicago and another summer trying to get an MFA from Bard College in upstate New York. Their* practice incorporates everything and anything, including video, photography, performance, food, drawing, sound, installation, and modes of sustainable living. Queerying everything, they often unselfconsciously manifest “the inappropriate/d other”–one whom you cannot appropriate and one who is inappropriate. Experiencing their works entails entering alter-curious worlds riddled with fact, fiction, poetry and mythology, that compel us to engage with layered propositions on the relationships between interspecies, ecology, gender, post-porn, sexuality and consciousness. Having recently come out as an ecosexual, they think of themselves as ‘some kind of artist working on some kind of nature’.
In works such as Chingari Chumma (2000), Trans- (2004-5) and Women Like Us (2010), they focus on the social and biological constructs of gender. I Love My India (2003), filmed at a public recreational space in Bombay questions India’s democracy in the candid, apathetic, ignorant or informed interviewed responses to the communal riots in Gujarat in 2002. Their work both references and transcends otherness in“What are You?” (2006), highlighting the complexities of the highly marginalized Hijra (eunuch) community and proposes an egalitarian, poly-gendered society. Between the Waves (2012), a 5-channel video installation marks a turning point towards queer ecology in Shah’s practice. It tells the viewers a grand narrative, figuratively and metaphorically, as if they have created a new story of the origin of species that has been forgotten for a long time, or has been found from the distant future, something that seems out of place everywhere. Their works have shown worldwide at museums, galleries and film festivals, including the Tate Modern (2006), Centre Pompidou (2011), Documenta 13 (2012) and British Film Institute (2013).
* We have avoided using personal pronouns as an experiment and expression of retirement from gender conformity.
