Scholarship
Chitra Ganesh & curated by Riya Lerner (2021) Artist’s Project: a city will share her secrets is you know how to ask, Public Art Dialogue, 11:2, 141-152
A city will share her secrets if you know how to ask (2020), digital prints on laminated vinyl, site-specific QUEERPOWER facade installation by Chitra Ganesh, was originally created for the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art’s annual site-specific QUEERPOWER commission. The project is an abundant and temporally layered love letter to New York City. Incorporating both historical and speculative imagery, this public artwork decentralizes New York City’s settler-colonial history to celebrate the narratives of those queer, transgender, Black, Indigenous, and people of color (QTBIPOC) alongside flora and fauna native to the region.
Jeannine Tang, Persons and Profiles: Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani's Index of the Disappeared (2004-), Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 30:3, 307-330, 2020
In the wake of September 11, artist Chitra Ganesh recalled how New York City was covered with posters and flyers, made by those who sought their disappeared loved ones, who were yet to be found by first responders. A year later, 760 men disappeared as a result of their 2001 FBI classification as “special interest” detainees, arising from unilateral executive actions initially undertaken by the Department of Justice, and subsequently legislated when Congress signed into law the USA Patriot Act on October 26, 2001.
Natasha Bissonauth, The Future of Museological Display: Chitra Ganesh’s Speculative Encounters, Museums, Sexuality, and Gender Activism, Routledge, 2020.
At the heart of Chitra Ganesh's artistic practice is the desire to tell stories and intervene in the storytelling tradition. 1 Her projects Eyes of Time at the Brooklyn Museum (2014-2015) and The Scorpion Gesture at the Rubin Museum (2018-2019) stage rich encounters between permanent collections and temporary insertions - her site-specific mural and digital animations, respectively.
Ronak K. Kapadia, The Queer Sumptuousness of Chitra Ganesh, The Archive, Leslie Lohman Museum, 68, 2020.
Powerful femmes are front and center in nearly all her works; junglees appear as feminized forms twisted and reassembled with the visual iconographies of the sacred and profane.
We see this most clearly in her fantastic 2014 Eyes of Time mixed-media mural at the Brooklyn Museum, which was part of her first solo museum show in New York. In this work, the artist reimagines the Goddess Devi’s avatar Kali— the warlike feminist icon of creation and destruction—as a three-breasted headless cyborg, adorned with wildly braided cascades of black hair and a girdle made of bloodied human arms and hands, as she powerfully controls the cycles of time. Ganesh’s luminous and complex works offer contaminated visions full of Hindu and Buddhist-inspired ideas of metaphysics, mythology, and temporality that are equally punk and queer. Wildness and wilding are everywhere in these works, which remind us that the junglee figure is not only a site of queer unruliness but also an altar to divine political knowledge about other ways of being in the world.
MARIAM GHANI AND CHITRA GANESH, How Do You See the Disappeared? A Warm Database, 2003–2007, in The Art Happens Here, NetArt Anthology, Rhizome, 2019
How Do You See the Disappeared? A Warm Database, commissioned by the digital art organization Turbulence, responded to data-gathering and surveillance in the wake of 9/11, and its role in rendition, deportation, detention, and other forms of political disappearance. In opposition to state-sponsored processes of surveillance and erasure, the project proposed a concept of “warm data”—deeply personal but non-identifying information that spoke to the lived experience of being subjected to political invisibility of various kinds.
Alpesh Kantilal Patel, The Art of Queering Asian Mythology in GLOBAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, TRANSGENDER, AND QUEER HISTORY, Charles Scribner's Sons, 2019, 127-134
An examination of LGBTQ-themed artwork through the lens of Asian mythology.
In 2017 the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei organized the first major museum exhibition of artwork dealing with LGBTQ themes across China, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. In much the same way, this entry examines works of art—from paintings, photography, and videos to installation, performance, and zines—that explore LGBTQ themes not only from East Asia but also from South Asia and Southeast Asia. While a broad array of countries and subjectivities are covered, the rationale for bringing these particular works together for analysis is not driven by an interest in being comprehensive.
Urmila Seshagiri, Chitra Ganesh, Aditi Sriram, and Kelly Tsai, Time is a Feminist Medium: A Roundtable Discussion, ASAP/Journal, Vol. 3.1 (2018): 13-39
The shock of form-breaking newness, the familiarity of ancient patterns of knowledge: colliding temporalities animate feminist artworks by the visual artist Chitra Ganesh, the writer-storyteller Aditi Sriram, and the spoken-word poet Kelly Tsai. Time itself serves as a malleable, expressive medium for these artists, whose wide-ranging and globally lauded feminisms uphold an ethos of art-as-advocacy.
Natasha Bissonauth, A Prophetic Vision that Dares to Imagine, Critical Collective, June 2018.
Silhouette in the Graveyard (2018), one of Chitra Ganesh's new digital animations in her show, The Scorpion Gesture (February 23, 20 l 8 to January 9, 2019), opens theatrically with a set of dancing curtains made of skeleton bones that quickly lift to reveal the underlying drama. As the moving image progresses, more skeletons fall, this time towards a hellish scene where waves, red like blood sway, carrying ghoulish monsters, scavenging beasts, and tortured bodies to places unknown.
Tehezeeb Moitra, Unruly Bodies and Untamed Voices. Re-writing the Immortal through Tales of Amnesia, Anglistica AION 20.1 (2016), 83-93
Chitra Ganesh’s Tales of Amnesia references Amar Chitra Katha, one of India’s most widely read comic books. Ganesh’s work interrogates the patriarchal logos perpetuated in the series by creating a separate enclave in which she disrupts the phallocentric signifiers and normative structures of the referent, giving way instead to a rigorous engagement with the uncontainable multiplicity of the female narrative. This essay examines how through a combination of words and images, the artwork takes on a subversive texture by apparently mimicking convention only to invert the locus of the original discourse into a meditation upon the power dynamics that surround the representation of gender.
Simone Leigh, Chitra Ganesh, and Uri McMillan, ALTERNATIVE STRUCTURES: AESTHETICS, IMAGINATION, AND RADICAL RECIPROCITY: AN INTERVIEW WITH GIRL
In the spring of 2012, on a visit to New York City, I took the train up to the Upper West Side on an explicit mission to visit the Jack Tilton Gallery. In a striking turn of fate, the gallery was running not one but two of my friends’ solo exhibitions simultaneously: CHITRA GANESH’s The Ghost Effect in Real Time and SIMONE LEIGH’s jam packed and jelly tight.
Anuradha Vikram, Pop Apocalypse
Monsters of the psyche are at play in Chitra Ganesh’s work. Incorporating mixed media and digital collage, her drawings are unpredictable, and sometimes vicious. Ganesh’s women have powers that rival even the cosmic forces that seem to continually tear apart their bodies. On the page, the ad hoc materiality of the street enters the privileged realm of drawing, with plastic gemstones, poster art, and other detritus, both humorous and aspirational, peppering the surface.
Bhadana, Bindu. "Index of the Disappeared: Representing the Invisible South." Artl@s Bulletin 5, no. 2 (2016): Article 9.
Jacques Rancière states that an aesthetic politics defines itself by a recasting of the distribution of the sensible. My text applies Rancière's statement in its analysis of Index of the Disappeared (2004-), a project created by two diasporic artists from the Global South based in the US. Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani productively use the gaps in de-classified post 9/11 documents to make visible the excluded and marginalized voices from contemporary politics and society in the North.
Saisha Grayson, Breathing Between the Lines: Re-Deconstruction in Chitra Ganesh’s Tales of Amnesia, n.paradoxa: International Journal of Feminist Art, vol. 29: Trans-Asia, January 2012.
Now in her mid-thirties, Indian-American artist Chitra Ganesh has reached a stage in her career marked by significant media and market attention. With her critically-lauded inclusion in the 2010 Saatchi Gallery exhibition, The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today, alongside art stars such as Subodh Gupta and Pushpamala N., she seems to have fully arrived as a major contributor to the increasingly prominent presence of artists from India and the Indian Diaspora in the contemporary global art world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, her digital collage works based on Hindu comic books have been particularly popular, as they present vibrant illustrations populated with sexy, mysterious figures, easily identifiable cultural markings of “Indianness,” and poetically vague but unmistakably-biting feminist textual narration.
Ashton Cooper, Queer Abstraction: A Roundtable with Loren Britton, Kerry Downey, John Edmonds, Mark Joshua Esptein, Avram Finkelstein, Chitra Ganesh, Glendalys Medina, and Sheila Pepe, ASAP/Journal, Vol. 2.2 (2017): 285-306
Although it would be difficult to find the very first use of “queer abstraction,” the phrase has come increasingly into use, not just in my own conversations with artists and curators, but also more widely in scholarly inquiry and at exhibitions. Its recent popularity is part of the wave of exciting new efforts over the past ten years or so to rescue abstraction, expressionism, and painting from the dustbin of masculinist bravado.
Gayatri Gopinath, Archive, Affect, and the Everyday: Queer Diasporic Re-Visions, 2010
This essay explores the interface of archive, affect, and the everyday in the works of contemporary South Asian queer diasporic visual artists Allan deSouza and Chitra Ganesh. In their work, as I hope to show, queer diasporic affect becomes a portal through which history, memory, and the process of archiving itself are reworked, in order both to critique the ongoing legacies of slavery, colonialism, and contemporary forms of racialization, and to imagine alternative forms of affiliation and collectivity.
Alice Royer, Warming Up Records: Archives, Memory, Power and Index of the Disappeared, InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 2010
Policies of censorship and secrecy in federal governance skyrocketed under the Bush Administration in the wake of 9/11; these measures allowed for the detainment of some 700 predominately Arab and South Asian immigrants, though no evidence was released linking them with the terrorist attacks. The documents pertaining to the holding of these “special interest” detainees were kept secret for a number of years, and only released by the Department of Justice after significant external pressures from watchdog groups such as the ACLU. Two artists, Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani, have called into question this exponential increase in the concealment of government documents with a project titled Index of the Disappeared.
Divine Guidance —Christopher Y. Lew, Assistant Curator, MoMA PS1
The dancer’s eyes widen into a blank stare as his head tips back slightly, his back arches, and one foot after the other lifts and steps, following the polyrhythmic drumming. The narrator of Divine Horsemen explains that the loa has “mounted” the Voudoun priest, the god‐like spirit controlling and guiding his body. While highly ritualized, the priest’s movements are automatic, motivated by another force.
New Emergent Bodies: The Art of Chitra Ganesh and Simone Leigh, Dean Daderko, Assistant Curator, CAMH Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2010
Audre Lorde wrote ¨the master´s tools will never dismantle the master´s house,¨1 in 1984. Had the timing been different, she could have easily been thinking about artworks by Chitra Ganesh and Simone Leigh.
Alice Royer, Warming Up Records: Archives, Memory, Power and Index of the Disappeared, InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 2010
Policies of censorship and secrecy in federal governance skyrocketed under the Bush Administration in the wake of 9/11; these measures allowed for the detainment of some 700 predominately Arab and South Asian immigrants, though no evidence was released linking them with the terrorist attacks. The documents pertaining to the holding of these “special interest” detainees were kept secret for a number of years, and only released by the Department of Justice after significant external pressures from watchdog groups such as the ACLU. Two artists, Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani, have called into question this exponential increase in the concealment of government documents with a project titled Index of the Disappeared.
Introduction to an Index Chitra Ganesh + Mariam Ghani, Radical History Review, Radical History Review (2011) 2011 (111): 110–129.
As an archive, Index of the Disappeared foregrounds the difficult histories of immigrant, ‘Other’ and dissenting communities in the U.S. since 9/11. Through official documents, secondary literature, and personal narratives, the Index archive traces the ways in which censorship and data blackouts are part of a discursive shift to secrecy that allows for disappearances, deportations, renditions and detentions on an unprecedented scale.
Svati P. Shah, Knowing “The Unknowns”: The Artwork of Chitra Ganesh, Feminist Studies 37, no. 1 (Spring 2011).
Chitra Ganesh was born in Brooklyn, New York, where she currently lives and works. Her work has been exhibited internationally and has attracted a following in Asia, Europe, and the United States. Over the past decade, she has become recognized as an artist whose work contributes much to the thinking on “feminist,” “queer,” and “South Asian” contemporary art. At the same time, Ganesh’s work has also been recognized for elucidating the productive complexities of having an aesthetic, style, and subject matter that elude the national and conceptual boundaries that currently constitute the ways in which the art world frames and promotes the work of emerging artists.
Mallica Kumera Landrus, Tradition, Trauma, Transformation, Brown University, 2011
A generation younger than Sheikh and Malani, Chitra Ganesh received her BA in comparative literature and semiotics from Brown University and her MFA from Columbia University. She has spent many years navigating the cultural terrain of living within the Indian diaspora in Brooklyn, where she was born in 1975 to Indian immigrant parents.