Analogue Hearts

Work in Photography, Art Film & Theatre
A Journey through Neha’s artistic work in film, theatre and media documented through Analogue Photography

In Neha’s words

“ I feel I have a memory of a recent past life in Bengal.

Shooting on film slows me down enough to access it.

Each street corner, tram line, and fading wall carried the weight of déjà vu as if I had lived here once before, in another skin, another story.

So, alongwith a few artists, I took myself on a journey of remembering reincarnation.

The city opened itself to me through monuments or skylines, through faces lined, luminous, weary, playful.

I found my lens drawn again and again to people: chai sellers leaning into smoke, children darting between yellow taxis, old men pausing mid-stride with eyes that seemed to recognize me.

The city, she asked me to listen, to notice, to wait. In the grain and blur, I saw time folding back on itself. Kolkata revealed itself as both intimate and infinite, a place where the personal meets the eternal.

Why does the past have so much to say?

And who listens?

These images are mixed – some portraits are of me taken by some strangers, some photographs are of friends, some images are fragments of my own memory, echoes of a past life surfacing through human expression.“

Andretta Valley, Himachal Pradesh
(Holga, B/W Film)

Andretta Valley, Himachal Pradesh
Canon Analogue SLR

Bijapur, Karnataka
January 2012

Chicago, Illinois
Canon Analogue SLR

Her, Pune
Canon Analogue, SuperNova

Auroville, Tamil Nadu
Lomography Super Sampler/Kodak Ultra Film 200

‘I Dream With My Eyes Open, I Close My Eyes To See’
Photography-Poetry Exhibit
Ann Arbor, Interarts Showcase

Walgreen Drama Centre, University of Michigan
Shot on Lomography Super Sampler, Holga &
Canon Analogue SLR

Performance Art & Theatre

Neha’s work as an artist, a stage manager and a performer in the film and theatre industry, both in India and the US, has been marked by a commitment to storytelling that explores trauma, intimacy, and transformation through an intersectional and embodied lens.

Over the years, it has been recognized for its raw authenticity and psychological depth, bridging personal healing with collective storytelling.

Performance:
“She’s too much”
Narratives of an “Intense” Woman (of color)
Chicago

Who is an intense individual? Who is an intense woman? Does gender define intensity? Who gets to label and who lives the label? This performance blended psychology, theatre and comedy to pose a comic question to the dominant narrative around Reality TV.

All the performers in this comic interactive performance embodied different types of (pseudo) feminists and debated the question:
“Reality TV: A Guilty Pleasure or just guilty?”
Defribrillator Gallery, Chicago

Performance:
91.27% Gayboy & Paradoxia

Two performance pieces, created for the Queer Ink India event, 91.27% gayboy and Paradoxia navigate several spaces, those of childhood, those of memory, those of the ‘taboo’ and those that explore what it means to be Indian and what it means to be queer, through the medium of physical theatre and poetry.

Queer Ink is India’s leading publishing house for Queer material. They host the ‘Queer Ink Safe Spaces’ event to build safe spaces for the queer community and allies to bond, share notes, and engage in community art making. In collaboration with performance artist, Vikrant Dhote.

Performance:
Gender Shadow, Theatre of the Oppressed
Auroville, International Pedagogy & Theatre of the Oppressed Conference, Kolkata
Dir: Evan Hastings

This piece on shadow puppetry and gender justice, directed by Evan Hastings, was one of Neha’s early explorations into using performance as a tool for collective healing.

The brighter the light the darker the shadow. Shadow Liberation uses creatively crafted visual stories to captivate the imagination and invite audiences to interrupt the injustice of gender violence.  

In the tradition of Augusto Boal’s Forum Theatre, audience members are invited on stage to offer improvisational interventions into scenes depicting oppression. This artistic dialogue offers no quick fix solutions but rather places faith in the emerging ethics of the community to creatively address the problem. We invite you to face the shadows through this remarkable work of participatory shadow theatre.

Through the language of light and shadow, she began examining the gendered unconscious, the hidden scripts of power, shame, and desire that shape both personal and social realities.

This training with Evan Hastings influenced Neha’s later work, where she integrates depth psychology, embodiment, and storytelling to bring the “shadow” into conscious dialogue in her therapy practice, writing, and retreats.

Performance:
Manifesting With Holly Hughes
The Aut Bar
Ann Arbor, Michigan

A series of independent performance-art pieces under New York based performance artist, Holly Hughes.
How do personal stories become theatrical narratives? How does one tell a story using just the body?

Performance:
Rizwaan
Ranga Shankara, Bangalore
Dir: Abhishek Majumdar, Indian Ensemble