Interview with Gayatri Sinha, Critical Collective India
Fingerprints, 2007. Archival digital print.
From classical Buddhist texts to early science fiction, Chitra Ganesh speaks of the femme body.
Critical Collective (CC): Your creative practise draws upon a variety of formats like comic books, digital art, drawings, textual works, films, murals and installations. You came to using comic book form characters, blurb bubbles, and subverted superhero or heroic tropes nearly two decades ago, and have recently revisited the possibilities of the form. What license does the medium afford you in your practice? Chitra Ganesh (CG): I see my engagement with comics as part of a larger interest in the visual languages of pop culture and everyday life - these include film posters, graffiti on the subway, and fantasy illustration. One of the wonderful things about comics in particular is that we are all equipped with the semiotic language to understand them, and it's great that people come to it with that sensibility of wanting to decode the visual grammar. To know that a certain shape signifies speech, while another suggests interior thought, or third person narrative, all of these nuances of how comics are put together and experience with the form since childhood, gives us the ability to read them. The content alongside the form has also provided an important access point for certain audiences. My early work Tales of Amnesia, which was based on the Amar Chitra Katha for example, tapped into a collectively held memory bank for audiences in India and its diaspora that had grown up reading the comic series. That's hundreds of millions of people for whom the form immediately evokes potent signifiers and memories. I also appreciate the flexibility of the comic form - the characters would literally come off the pages and fly around when I would read them. These comics were particularly important to me growing up; they were part of a heterotopia of narrative, myth, and history, a transmission of value, of a secular India, from my parent's to me. Amar Chitra Katha provided a shared frame of reference, both visual and narrative, with my cousins (and other readers) across the ocean. Additionally, ACK, at the time, included stories of Muslim and lower caste heroes, something which became less prominent with the rise in Hindu nationalism.