“Essay” For Chitra Ganesh 2015-16 Estelle Lebowitz Visiting Artist Catalogue of Exhibition

(A PDF if the catalogue is available here.)

Art is not the end but a beginning. -Aie Wei Wei

The art of Chitra Ganesh is an active conversation held between multiple identities engaging the questions of representation of women, their bodies, and imagined realities through a playful interrogation of received forms in culture, both high and low. Influenced by
her parents immigration to urban New York and their attempt at keeping her well versed in South Indian Tamilian culture, Ganesh’s work appropriates images from Indian comics of her childhood, Bollywood heroines, subverting the codes and messages imbedded in them, to more radical possibilities. Equally inspired by traditional South Indian music and dance as by the subway chalk work of Keith Haring, Ganesh’s art asks us to question the cultural assumptions involved in any work of creative expression.

Ganesh came to understand herself as a feminist in high school attending pro-choice rallies, and later in the nineties when she became active in queer rights. The progress of this involvement has led her to more actively engage performance and activism, and fully realize the power that images have to effect change in a world of structural inequalities and various forms of racial and cultural oppression. More recently, her work has been informed by the rise in visibility of protest around the world. The protest movements around Eric Gardner, Michael Gray, Freddie Brown, the color umbrella protests in Hong Kong, the protests in Thailand using the three fingers from the Hunger Games, and farmers movements in India, draw semiotic relationships through the use of performance and performative acts. Ganesh’s images provide an amplified collective awareness of people challenging inequality of wealth, racism, sexism and state repression.

Ganesh is as an editor and translator of our collective perceptions, triggering her audience to reconsider how they think. Her work is about new approaches to communicating ideas that challenge power and how sexuality is represented. It is often the story that remains is the story that is told by those in power. Ganesh takes authority and inscribes new stories of power in her artwork.

Ganesh’s work on the Index of the Disappeared* is her foregrounding of the stories of those who those in power do not tell; the histories of immigrants and dissenting communities
in the United States since 9-11. She brings out the need to look at censorship, disappearance, deportation, secret renditions, stories of people that are hardly seen or told. It catalogues and creates a body of work around what is missing and carves out a space using images to open up alternative narratives to become a part of the history. Ganesh’s work shows how art and visual culture can challenge and provide new accounts of stories.

Ganesh’s work is read differently in each context that it is experienced such as in the US, India and Europe. She is constantly looking to experiment and try new ideas, attempting
to influence the art world and stay engaged in her political projects. As art continues to be an arena for the speculative market to invest money, it is those with money that define what is art. Within this structure, trying to make work that is political and trying to challenge the status quo is difficult. But Ganesh continues to focus her work on challenging power, the neoliberalism in the art world, and issues of sexuality and gender. The range of her work is a continual invitation to reconsider the nature of power and in the way culture is constructed in order to discover and celebrate alternative narratives of power, feminist, queer, post-colonial; always radical, getting to the root.

Radhika Balakrishnan, PhD

Faculty Director, Center for Women’s Global Leadership Professor, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

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* Index of the Disappeared is a collaboration, ongoing since 2004, between artists Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani. The Index is both a physical archive of post-9/11 disappearances - detentions, deportations, renditions, redactions - and a platform for public dialogue around related issues. The Index archive is based in Brooklyn and is open to scholars for research by appointment.