Chitra Ganesh: Selected Works On Paper

Fake nails, tinsel and glitter gleam on the surface of Chitra Ganesh's (b. 1975) mixed-media Double Vision, drawing our eyes towards sumptuous textures and surfaces as she traces sci-fi-like narratives onto the body through references to surrealism, South Asian iconography and comics. In Double Vision, a goddess figure with a camera apparatus as headdress peers into a crystal ball from which another figure looks out into our space from behind a camera. From one gaze to another, their visions are doubled, as Ganesh configures a new, queer system of sight in which the "othered" body is both surveilled and empowered to no longer feel foreign. 

Ganesh's series Delicate Line: Corpse She was Holding, of which several prints are on view at PAFA, similarly refuses to objectify the body, as figures simultaneously emerge from the interior of the page and unravel in flowing with the artist's signature glitter operates as a tantalizing flourish. Despite the robust layering technique, Ganesh's title refers to the "delicacy" of her contours, a quality that oscillates between constructive and destructive transformative powers.