Chitra Ganesh
In Chitra Ganesh’s haunting video, Silhouette in the Graveyard, future and past meet in Maitreya, an avatar of the Future Buddha, whose prophetic descent to earth is said to usher in a new age at a time when the terrestrial world has lost its way. Particularly relevant to this week’s sea change in society, the stream of images documenting political, social, and ecological evil that bombard our news feeds daily seemed an uncanny link to the apocalyptic moment that Maitreya’s arrival proclaims. Likewise, in her painting, Arrow from a series titled Protest Fantasies, the work acts as poetic meditations on images of protest, aligning them with performative actions in contemporary cultures across the globe. Ganesh says, “The themes I’m focused on in this new series range from widespread demonstrations against police violence in the United States, to protesting land grabs and mining of ancestral forests, to commemorating garment workers’ rights in South Asia, to honoring the Russian punk activists Pussy Riot. This series explores the connections, aesthetic and political, that these moments of resistance share.”
Tree of Life, 2019
Action Plan, 2015
After the storm, 2019
The Arrow, 2015