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| View of “Chitra Ganesh,” 2015, Brooklyn Museum, New York |
courtesy: artforum
EYES
OF TIME is a drawing-based installation that also incorporates
sculpture into a mural. The main figure takes its inspiration from a key Indian
concept of divine feminine power, Shakti, of which the goddess Kali is a fierce
iteration. Kali embodies time and change in Hindu and Buddhist writings such as
the Vedas, Upanishads, and Devi Mahatmyam. According to these scriptures, we’re
living in KaliYug, or dark ages of strife and discord.
The mural’s
central figure, towering over the viewer at fifteen feet tall, wears a skirt of
human arms, in line with popular portrayals of Kali as a demon-slaying goddess.
The bodies in Eyes
of Time literally
pop off the wall, exceeding the limits of the two-dimensional frame. I’ve been
working with clocks over the past year and a half, having sourced antique
hardware and clock parts from local bazaars for exhibitions last year in Delhi
and Mumbai. For this installation, large brass gears were fabricated in an
allusion to the notion of mythic time as a circular rather than linear force,
which has been on my mind as a point of intersection between contemporary
sci-fi and traditional mythical narratives.
As part of the
exhibition, I was given the opportunity to curate an arrangement of objects
from the museum’s permanent collection, both ancient and contemporary
representations of femininity, in order to shed light on the conceptual
context, in both historic and contemporary art, for my own work. I also researched
exhibition catalogues that addressed the concept of Shakti within their
theoretical and curatorial framings. I examined a broad range of
representations of Shakti and Kali, from kitschy fantasy art and
twenty-first-century cultural appropriations to ancient abstraction and bronze
statues dating as far back as the sixth century BCE. Eyes
of Time picks
up on a number of the ideas and formal references running through these curated
objects, as I considered both visual and thematic resonance in my selection
process.
One example is Eyes,
1996, a Louise Bourgeois drypoint
print featuring a sea of endlessly repeating eyes which articulate ideas of the
body in light of fragmentation, repetition, and iconicity. There’s also a 1971
psychedelic screenprint, Relate to Your Heritage, by Barbara Jones-Hogu, who was a part of the
collective AfriCOBRA in the 1960s. I also included two figurines of ancient
goddesses from Egypt and India, one of which is Sehmet, the Egyptian goddess of
fertility and menstruation, and the other a seventeenth-century bronze statue
of Kali. Some objects I initially selected faced conservation issues, such as
being hundreds of years old or so fragile they could only be shown every few
years at most—issues that one doesn’t typically have to consider with
contemporary objects.
My first zine, Tales
of Amnesia, 2002–2007, is also displayed in a vitrine in this show. The
museum has made copies of it for visitors to peruse in order to contextualize Eyes
of Time with
zines and comics that focus on the intersection of ancient myth and popular
science fiction, which is a critical aspect of my practice. There will be some
programming around the exhibition, and the Brooklyn Museum will also be
screening a few of the films I’ve made, such as the collaboration I did with Simone Leigh as well as an animation. I’m also
hoping to have a dance party as one of my public events. Coincidentally, in the
’90s there was even a queer club in London called Club Kali.
