Over the past decade, Zuleikha Chaudhari has examined law as performance, exploring the role of theatricality within legal systems and the ways in which legal truth is produced through staged hearings with lawyers, retired judges and actors and/or artists as central witnesses to examine how legal narratives are performatively produced and what constitutes evidence.
Performance is not considered simply an output but a method of investigation taking the form of public auditions and rehearsals proposing theatre/processes as ‘counter’ to the empirical demands of forensics. Can the rehearsal, with its untidy process of thought and consideration and its related notions of version, repetition, and failure, be considered an artistic experiment in which truth is dynamic, constructed, contested, asserted, fought over, and interrogated?
Part of Episode XXXIV: “Nous Accusons II. People’s Tribunals between Politics, Activism and Art” with Zuleikha Allana, Warisha Farasat, Harsh Mander & Florian Malzacher
14. FEB 2026 – Black Box, New Delhi / India
In co-production with the Goethe-Institut/ Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi & the Alkazi Theatre Archive
Biography
Zuleikha Chaudhari is a theatre director and lighting designer based in New Delhi. Her ongoing research considers the structures and codes of performance as well the function and processes of the actor as reality and truth production. From 2015 onwards she has been exploring the framework of law as performance, the role of performance in law and the performativity of legal truth-production. Her works have been shown at the Weiner Festwochen, KunstenFestivaldesArts, Festival D’Automne, Seoul Performing Arts Festival, Asian Performing Arts Festival, Tokyo, Berlin Biennale, Kochi Biennale, Dhaka Art Summit amongst others. She is the director of the Alkazi Theatre Archives at The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, New Delhi and currently a scholar at the Center for Race and Gender at the University of California, Berkeley.
