Important Notice

Although her oeuvre spans several different genres including video, printmaking, installation and photography, Chitra Ganesh explains that all of her work is animated by the same fundamental themes and questions. “There is a thread that runs through my work that is based on the content or the kind of questions I’m asking. I am interested in recovering and fleshing out erased moments in history or mythology and imagining them more fully. Using... Although her oeuvre spans several different genres including video, printmaking, installation and photography, Chitra Ganesh explains that all of her work is animated by the same fundamental themes and questions. “There is a thread that runs through my work that is based on the content or the kind of questions I’m asking. I am interested in recovering and fleshing out erased moments in history or mythology and imagining them more fully. Using different media allows one to approach the same problem from different angles and allows the audience to bring their own related viewing experience to that particular medium” (as quoted in Natasha Bissounath, “Storytelling”, Art & Deal, Vol. 5, No. 4, Issue 26, 2008, p. 96).

The ‘erased moments’ that Ganesh excavates often concern imbalanced power dynamics, exposing the ways in which broad cultural and historical narratives tacitly overlook, or perhaps intentionally ignore the subaltern. In her work, then, Ganesh presents those that have been denied both voice and mobility as gendered, sexualized and politicized beings.

Speaking about the present lot, an epic mixed-media mural painted across four large panels, Alexander Keef notes that an “…atmosphere of gory metamorphosis and corporeal instability runs through Chitra Ganesh’s 2007 ‘The Lucky One (Slow Burn).’ Ganesh is an artist who has evinced a long interest in narrative and the enduring mutability of myth, mining a rich vein of South Asian popular culture, particularly comic-book renditions of ancient Hindu twice-told tales that the artist skews and tweaks, jarring their pedagogical and patriarchal homilies into something more threatening and strange, interrupting their smooth narrative flow, creating gaps and disjuncture. But ‘The Lucky One’ pays oblique homage to a foundational myth of a rather more recent vintage, the famous eye-cutting scene from Un chien andalou, Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali's collaboration from 1929. The film notoriously opens with a graphic and disturbing scene of a man using a scalpel to slice open a seated woman's eye, which is shown in uncomfortable detail. The transgressive image circles back on its viewer, whose own eye seems suddenly implicated and vulnerable, seeing the unseeable. Ganesh revisits this moment fraught with violence, this epistemic visual rupture that marks the birth of Surrealism, centering her own gaze on the eye of a decapitated woman, staring back at us inviolate, glassy and hard, immune to further becoming, alien and fixed. On all sides there erupts a tangled spree of organs and entrails, stylized blood, blades and orifices. Ganesh takes the feminine vulnerability of the eye that sits at the heart of Bunuel and Dali's surrealist mytheme and reverses it, making of it an uncut, wide-eyed witness” (“Introduction”, India Xianzai, Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai exhibition catalogue, 2009, p. 26, 27).

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