In artist Chitra Ganesh’s latest exhibition, Protest Fantasies at Gallery Wendi Norris in San Francisco, protest becomes something more than rebellion — it becomes internal.

Feminine, feminist, maker, breaker, aggressive, sensual, intelligent, curious; these are all the qualities that define Chitra’s protagonists. Much of the artist’s practice has been preoccupied with both acknowledging and challenging a monolithic Indian feminine ideal, and that means engaging with the baggage that comes with it. She challenges the normative ideals and expectations that came from the community she grew up in to conform to a vision of the good Indian girl who should find success in a family life of her own.

Habitat is a weekly series that visits with artists in their workspaces.

This week’s studio: Chitra Ganesh; Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. “I try to spend as much studio time as possible doing what visual artists would like to be doing all of the time—making preparatory sketches, doing visual research, and experimenting with materials and compositions,” Ganesh said, leading me around her Brooklyn studio.

Ganesh has produced an immersive installation-a mural accompanied by vitrines-which features Kali, the Hindu goddess of change. time, destruction, and regeneration as one of the 39 figures originally invited to The Dinner Party. Though Ganesh's work often deals with mythological themes, here she directly explores a particularly significant mythological figure by portraying Kali three times over: as past. present, and future.

By Kavita Das, published in The Aerogram, India

Chitra Ganesh is a South Asian American visual artist who has earned accolades and awards and exhibited her bold and inventive work all over the world. She’s also one of my oldest friends. Not only did we share many common experiences of a desi upbringing in New York City, our mothers were also high school classmates in Calcutta.

With composite figures in dramatic situations drawn using a pool of popular cultural references, Chitra Ganesh explores propositions of beauty and femininity, aesthetics and teratology. Nivedita Magar speaks to Brooklyn-based Ganesh, a leading artist of the South Asian diaspora, about the thematic motivations behind A Zebra Among Horses, her first solo in New Delhi, on display at Gallery Espace, from the 28th of September to the 31st of October.