How We Get the Job Done: Chitra Ganesh

Chitra Ganesh’s work traverses worlds and realities, exploring history’s feminist and queer stories and imagining the future. Through her long and successful creative journey, Chitra has asserted the critical agendas and visual stories of brown artists, keeping alive a needed momentum. Her list of inspirations is vast, from Smita Patil, whom she celebrates for her dark-skinned beauty and commitment to parallel cinema, to Keith Haring for ripping through subway tunnels and advertising space with his drawings, to Phoolan Devi for taking revenge on her attackers and occupying space and power.

The visual artist, who is based in Brooklyn, always has several things in process at once.

Currently on her plate are two large scale installations that explore queerness politically and conceptually, at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston and the Hayward Gallery in Southbank, London. She is working with poet and musician Saul Williams to create an animation for his June-release album, and on an iteration of Her garden, a mirror, a feminist utopia project which premiered at The Kitchen last fall, that will be shown alongside new sculptural and video material at the Dhaka Art Summit in Bangladesh next February.