CHENNAI: Artist Nicky Chandam is an interdisciplinary storyteller whose work spans photography, writing, oral traditions, and performance. Born in Manipur and based in Delhi for nearly 20 years, her practice looks at memory, women’s experiences, and cultural histories that are often left out of mainstream narratives. Nicky is in Chennai with around 58 photographs for her solo exhibition, ‘Manipur & Archives – A Visual Documentation of Live Art Over a Decade’. The exhibition brings together photographs taken between 2011 and 2025, shown together for the first time. Through these images, she captures the many performance spaces and artistic communities that exist across Manipur.
“Manipur’s live art landscape holds a diverse cultural space that engages with both national and global artistic conversations. For me, these photographs create a visual dialogue between local identity and universal expression,” Nicky tells us. Since 2010, she has documented art and performance spaces across Delhi, while also building a longterm visual archive of Manipur’s changing creative landscape. The exhibition that is on till May 31 at Alliance Francaise of Madras, is organised thematically and geographically, moving between Manipur’s community-rooted performance traditions and non-regional performances held in the state.