With Orchid Meditations, Brooklyn-based artist Chitra Ganesh returns to Gallery Espace and New Delhi after a decade, 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. Reflecting on the delicate and precarious bloom of orchid flowers, Orchid Meditations is anchored in the tension between predictability and disruption that grounds the seasonal cycles of our daily lives. Seasons mark growth and loss, and historically correlate to weather, though this is now grimly unstable.

While Ganesh’s work has long moved between the deep past and far future as well as the mythic and everyday, this body of work reflects a more recent turn towards first person experiences and lived time. Beyond her long standing practice of looking to a wide range of global and Indian visual sources from high art and popular culture, Ganesh’s inquiries in Orchid Meditations refer obliquely to the Barahmasa, a poetic genre of Indian folklore that reflects on the rhythms of the year. Though much of Ganesh’s work abstracts time and gestures towards universality, the artist also speaks directly to the noxious exigencies, crises, and hopes of our current moment, including in her ambitious animation Before the War.

– Beth Citron

Review in Open Magazine

Interview in The Indian Express

Feature in Mint Lounge