“Chitra Ganesh: Dreaming in Multiverse to open at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum
The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis will present the first solo exhibition in the Midwest by Brooklyn, N.Y.-based artist Chitra Ganesh. In her multidisciplinary practice, Ganesh draws on Buddhist and Hindu iconography, science fiction, queer theory, comics, Surrealism, Bollywood posters and video games, combining them with her own imagery to present speculative visions of society in the past, present and future.
“Chitra Ganesh: Dreaming in Multiverse” reflects the artist’s commitment to making worlds that are tethered to culture and history, yet unbound from the limitations of contemporary reality. At the Kemper Art Museum, Ganesh will exhibit 13 digital prints that together comprise the artist’s “Multiverse Dreaming” suite, as well as a selection of her video animations. The exhibition will be on view Feb. 18 through July 25, 2022.
“Multiverse Dreaming,” her fourth comics series, was largely completed during COVID-19 lockdowns. The suite of prints is inspired by Amar Chitra Katha (literally “Immortal Picture Stories”), a popular series of comic books originating in the 1960s in India that includes tales of epic myth, folklore and history of the South Asian subcontinent.
Ganesh uses the series as a point of departure, constructing images by digitally combining her own pen and ink drawings with visual fragments appropriated from the comics to present nonlinear narratives that focus on reflection, regeneration and desire in times of uncertainty.
In “Urgency” (2020), the opening print, Ganesh presents a three-headed figure whose symbolic implements — surgical mask, oil lamp, electric megaphone — reflect contemporary anxieties, mythological archetypes and apocalyptic futures.
Ganesh’s interweaving of disparate visual idioms, poetic texts and shape-shifting bodies across these prints invites viewers to consider utopian possibilities, while also tapping into a collective memory for audiences in India and its diaspora that have grown up reading these comics. The project notably centers women, femme bodies and queer relationships, reorienting traditional narratives around experiences and communities that have been marginalized, historically in her source material as well as in the contemporary art world.
With her time-based animations, the artist extends her experimentation with visual narratives, instilling a dynamic sense of dimensionality and depth within the varied graphic languages she employs. Like her prints, these works challenge conventions of gender, sexuality and power by centering complex narratives — often of mythological or epic proportions — around iconic women protagonists and forms.
“Rabbit Hole” (2010), one of her earliest animations, explores the intertwining of creation and destruction through the fragmented body of a femme-presenting figure, while “Before the War” (2021), her newest video, examines themes of love, memory and loss amidst political polarization and the COVID-19 pandemic. The visual imagery, combined with music and lyrics by the singer and songwriter Saul Williams, probes how personal and political conflicts are often intertwined and can be bearers of profound transformation.
“Chitra Ganesh: Dreaming in Multiverse” is organized for the Kemper Art Museum by Meredith Malone, curator. The exhibition is generously supported by the Siteman Family Charitable Fund.