Thursday, February 14, 2013

Building a imaginary hybrid world

Chitra Ganesh, a prominent and internationally celebrated artist, uses her work as a means of questioning the many opposites, which exist within the framework of the so-called ‘society’ that we live in.

Recovering buried histories to consciously bring them into a public and contemporary realm has informed her art practice and her working with contemporary/ historical political figures and mass mediated imagery. She states, “This imagery has not been fully explored; these stories contain question marks that can be best articulated through imaginative visual language.”

Her diverse oeuvre that includes installations and sculptural works is largely an outcome of a mélange of factors, such as queer politics, present day imperialism, lyric poetry, mythological narratives, and erased moments in South Asian history. Treating these as a starting point, she integrates them with her mythic imagery, to conceive a hybrid world, which articulates both psychic transformation and historical conflict.

While firmly rooted in a Western, postmodern discourse, Chitra Ganesh’s cultural references let her convey the principle of a multiplicity as a spirit, which draws together, and not breaks apart. In her comic book like sequences of digital prints, the artist includes snippets of text, successfully marrying with the post-modern in a truly unique aesthetic.

She is known for appropriating Amar Chitra Katha comics to ingenious (and titillating) effect simultaneously. Her diverse portfolio comprising digital collages, works on paper, photographs and paintings display disjunctive narratives, cracking visual motifs and aesthetically pleasing constructions. Employing her wide-ranging visual vocabulary, she strives to eliminate all those boundaries, which exist between race and sex. Her bold, surreal images reflect varying representations of female sexuality and power.

Much like mythologies in which deities are at once unified and disparate - Chitra Ganesh's work is a mix of separate productive moves, which happen to work in harmony!

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