It’s not about answers

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With a multi-faceted practice that draws on a variety of media, she enjoys the challenges of working with a unique and distinct set of materials, processes and histories. Brooklyn-based artist Chitra Ganesh, who is having her first-ever solo show in Delhi, will be displaying digital collages in archival prints, mixed media drawings, a collage on board and a site-specific mural installation.
Sharing her experience of working on site-specific installations, Chitra says, “The project that I am working on here comprises of numerous works on paper which have been layered and stitched together. I enjoy the unexpected challenges that pop up when I work site specifically – negotiating ladders, height, the public coming in while I am at work, and working to fill a relatively large space fairly quickly.”
Most of her artworks are inspired by the images from Amar Chitra Katha, which presents a religious and cultural narrative based on Hindu mythology and South Asian history. “Amar Chitra Kathas are read and distributed widely across the globe with the explicit intent of educating children about the cultural history of South Asia. Like collections of Grimm’s fairy tales, Greek myths, vampire stories, or other popular folklore, Amar Chitra Katha comics provide prescriptive models of citizenship, nationalism, religious expression, public behavior and sexuality. The works were created by integrating fragments of the original comics with pen and ink drawings and rewriting the text. I’d like to create a mythology that poses questions rather than gives clear answers,” says Chitra.
Irrespective of whether she is working with digital collage, painting, installation, photography or video, hand drawing remains at the core of her practice. She shares, “For me, drawing retains a special immediacy and facilitates an intuitive, organic way of working which I just love. I really enjoy the simplicity of the materials – the scratch of graphite on paper, or the line quality of sumi ink brushstrokes. This reduction of means has provided me an opportunity to focus on a more direct process of translating the ideas in one’s head onto the page.”
A significant characteristic of her work is the fusion of digital with analog. That according to her represents a shift in her process that mirrors the growing number of ways in which technology has produced an integration of analog and digital, which can be both seamless and fraught at the same time.