Artist Chitra Ganesh On Bringing Plants’ Regenerative Power to Penn Station, Observer, September 2024.
With "Regeneration," the artist hopes to remind viewers of the "vibrant life that thrives in nature and to reconnect them with elements that transcend the limitations of humanity."
By Elisa Carollo • 09/23/24 4:48pm
Brooklyn-based artist Chitra Ganesh has just unveiled a large-scale public video installation at New York’s Penn Station, part of the “Art at Amtrak” series of rotating exhibitions curated by award-winning public art producer Debra Simon and her team. Known for her distinctive graphic and comic style, Ganesh blends South Asian iconography with science fiction and queer feminist theory. Her work celebrates feminine energies and ancestral symbolism, inspiring a deeper symbiosis between living beings, beginning with a reconnection to the inner self.
Chitra Ganesh’s Regeneration at New York’s Penn Station. Photos by David Plakke
For this commission, Ganesh created Regeneration, a highly symbolic video narrative focused on the regenerative power of plants. The immersive video is designed to remind commuters of the vibrant life thriving in nature and reconnect them with, as the artist puts it, elements that transcend humanity’s limitations, encouraging a regeneration of perspective and a reset of both the mental and the physical.
This marks the first time the “Art at Amtrak” series, which previously installed works in the Amtrak Rotunda and 8th Avenue Concourse, has put art in the Hilton Corridor. Observer spoke with Ganesh at the unveiling of the installation, which complements her other video work, Coherence, on view in Moynihan Train Hall through October 14.
Chitra, your video works incorporate many elements of your symbolic and visual language. The flora, along with specific plants and species, seems intentionally symbolic in the narrative you’ve created. For example, the Rose of Jericho and the Welwitschia plant of Southwest Africa symbolize resilience, while others are native to the NYC area. How would you describe the importance of plants in your narrative, and how do they serve as metaphors for broader societal phenomena throughout human history?
I use plants from many regions worldwide to underscore humanity’s consistent recognition and association of plants with healing, regeneration, growth, resilience and remembrance. It seems especially important to remember that we humans are in a symbiotic relationship with plants—as we live through an unprecedented moment of climatic destruction that endangers countless species worldwide to the point of extinction. Plants have forever been at the forefront of human consciousness as a metaphor for life cycles and a scale of life and time in nature that is much larger than we typically think daily.
I was also interested in how specific plant qualities are similarly recognized across cultures, sometimes having multiple and universal resonances. Two examples are the calla lily and the dandelion. Calla lilies originated in South Africa and then migrated around the world. In Greek and Roman symbology, their chalice-like shape represented rebirth and bounty. In Mexican culture, they have been associated with purity and rebirth, often seen in historical paintings depicting Easter. I was also inspired by Diego Rivera’s use of calla lilies in his large-scale murals and paintings, which symbolize rebirth and revolution, as the works between 1920 and 1940 were made during the Mexican revolutions.