The moving imagery of Chitra Ganesh, Mint Lounge
Chitra Ganesh at the opening of her show at Gallery Espace. (Courtesy of the artist/Gallery Espace)
LAST PUBLISHED 13.02.2023 | 09:05 AM IST
As soon as you enter Gallery Espace in Delhi, you feel you have stepped into a colourful bubble, complete with large-scale comic prints and Indian iconography. You leave behind the chaos and humdrum of the city to enter the immersive world of Chitra Ganesh. Her work has always combined South Asian iconography, science fiction and queer theory with pop culture influences such as film posters and Amar Chitra Katha comics. But her ongoing solo, Orchid Meditations, offers a glimpse of Ganesh’s new experimental language. Besides the comic prints, the exhibition features unique animation, Before The War, created with the support of Ford Foundation Just Films and Studio NYC. Threads from this animation can be seen in Ganesh’s new works on paper as well.
In her essay on the show, Beth Citron, New York-based art historian, critic and curator, writes: “With ‘Orchid Meditations’, Brooklyn-based artist Chitra Ganesh returns to Gallery Espace and New Delhi after a decade (her work has been shown in India in the interim at the 4th Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2018), bridging a long-standing engagement with experimental and non-linear narrative modes, long temporal arcs, and the language of comics with newer mediums and approaches, including animation.”
One has seen many shades of Ganesh through her two-decade-long practice. From drawing and painting, the artist’s visual vocabulary has grown to span mediums such as collage, wall drawings, computer-generated imagery, video, sculpture, and now animation. “Ganesh subverts traditional storytelling to create women and queer-centric narratives of the future. She draws out alternative depictions of sexuality and power from popular stories and histories, highlighting the accounts of female protagonists, which have often been subsumed or marginalised by plot lines that reproduce the contours of majoritarian power,” states the curatorial note.