Brooklyn-based Chitra Ganesh to reimagine the 1905 Bengali sci-fi novel Sultana’s Dream in bustling Soho — Gallery Wendi Norris

July 9, 2020

By Shaikh Ayaz

This Fall, New York's Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art and artist Chitra Ganesh will reveal a message on its window panels through 'QUEERPOWER', an installation on queer and urban imageries that will stay on view for a year.

Bengali sci-fi novel Sultana’s Dream reimagined by artist Chitra Ganesh in a new installation titled ‘QUEERPOWER’

Imagine a world where all social and political rules are set by women, while men stay behind at homes. Welcome to Ladyland of Sultana’s Dream, the ultimate feminist manifesto written by the Bengali Muslim author Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain in 1905, a difficult time in the state’s history as it stood at the cusp of Partition in colonial India. This radical tale has long preoccupied Brooklyn-based artist Chitra Ganesh. Come October and she will reinterpret it once again in a new installation titled ‘QUEERPOWER’ that will occupy 12 window panels at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (LLMA) in New York—an institution known for promoting LGBTQ-themed art and other gay events.

Born in Brooklyn to Indian parents, Chitra Ganesh’s installation ‘QUEERPOWER’ looks at queer and urban imageries as well as their changing histories in New York City

Window Shopping

“It’s exciting because the installation spans the museum’s facade, wrapping around a street corner in Soho. It’ll be visible 24/7 to the public,” she tells AD India in a phone interview from her Brooklyn studio. The installation will draw on queer and urban narratives to explore the impact of gentrification on LGBTQ history as well as reflect on its future. “It is especially meaningful for me to meditate on these themes as someone who came of age in a very different New York City, in late 1980s and early ’90s, where the queer and immigrant kids freely roamed around downtown streets,” she says.

A Relevant Tale

Ganesh first read Sultana’s Dream many years ago and quickly became captivated. She believes the story is particularly relevant today. “The book stresses the need for collective knowledge sharing, this idea of generosity and people having enough, growing one’s own food, conserving energy by storing water, use of solar power… all these ideas that Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain talks about are the very ideals we still need to meet today.” Sultana’s Dream was published five years before its Western counterpart Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, a seminal sci-fi feminist text that advocated an alternate world of female domination.

Sultana’s Vivid Dreams

‘QUEERPOWER’s dozen “murals” each take visual cues from Sultana’s Dream, with an emphasis on New York City as it has swiftly transformed over time and continues to change amidst a global pandemic and racial uprisings. So while one drawing vividly depicts an all-female haven with men confined to their mardanas (as opposed to zenana) another features protagonist Sultana raptly gazing out of her window. Below, a rickshaw puller is blissfully asleep under the watchful embrace of an all-seeing moon. This particular setting, especially the Bengali home, is a hat-tip to the pioneering physicist and biologist Jagdish Chandra Bose’s 118-year-old residence in Calcutta (a museum today). Besides having a lunar crater named after him on the far side of the moon, Bose has also been dubbed the father of Bengali science fiction, best known as the author of Palatak Toofan (The Runaway Cyclone) in which people use hair oil to tame a tropical storm.

Grappling With Past

Ganesh reveals that she has spent the last few years poring over research about architecture, an interest that found its way into her latest work. One of the 12 tableaux, for example, has the Buddhist site Somapura Mahavihara as its backdrop. “QUEERPOWER’ led me to everything, from Islamic and Buddhist architecture to Zaha Hadid,” she adds. Exploring architecture made Ganesh aware of how “important it is to look at the past.” Though born in Brooklyn she hails from a Tamil Brahmin family with her parents (her mother died in 1998) tracing their roots to Calcutta. Her creative relationship with India has always been fruitful, says Ganesh who has earlier exhibited in Mumbai in the summer of 2018 and was part of the Kochi Biennale later that year.

Ganesh is interested in architecture. This drawing has the Buddhist site Somapura Mahavihara as its backdrop

A Sense Of Protest

This January, she was travelling through India and Bangladesh and even found time to visit the Shaheen Bagh protests. While not exactly an activist she does admit, “I find the energy and activity that happens around social movements very inspiring.” At the anti-CAA protests in Delhi, she soaked in music, art and slogans thanks to an array of artists who enthusiastically performed for the sit-in crowd. “There’s a lot of overlap between art and social awareness and the role that art can play to raise social consciousness,” she argues, refusing to disguise her belief in art’s obligation to make people think and its power to open minds. “It doesn’t always have to be about politics. Art can help people take a pause, reflect and understand their surroundings and relationships differently.”

Quarantine Challenges

Barely had she landed in New York after her hectic subcontinent tour when Ganesh found herself confronting the COVID-19 lockdown. Suddenly, life changed. A new world order was in place. Like most artists and professionals, the quarantine was a good excuse to create and make it count but at the same time, it presented its own challenges as she says, “There is the anxiety and panic of the uncertainty and the extreme isolation that everybody is dealing with. And the economy! Well, it was already bad enough before the pandemic hit and now it’s insane.” Plus, living in Trump’s America, you cannot escape the guilt of being complicit in the George Floyd murder.

‘Black Lives Matter’ Movement

On May 25, the innocent young black American became both an unfortunate victim and famous symbol of police brutality. The incident has sparked the ‘Black Lives Matter’ campaign, which The New York Times has recently described as the “largest movement in US history.” Ganesh, whose comics-savvy art has butted heads with racism, police brutality, injustice and immigration in the past, sounds genuinely hurt when she says, “The Floyd question is very urgent. It was a long time coming. Policing in the US is a huge problem with a big history which is not unconnected from lynching and segregation.” The NYPD has an approximate $6 billion dollar annual budget, much of which “should be going into housing and health,” she opines.

Her Junglee Aesthetics

An MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University whose admirers include MoMA, Whitney and the Andy Warhol Museum, the artist may be politically committed but draws equally from surrealism, animation, sci-fi, literature and comics like Amar Chitra Katha. She once described herself as having “junglee aesthetics.” Mention this and she grins, declaring, “I don’t conform. That’s what I meant.” Her obsessive passion for mythology has led her to sources as deeply varied as Greek, Buddhist and Indian civilisation. From celebrating Goddess Kali’s might to Madhubala’s beauty and from cheekily replacing Hanuman with female iconography, Ganesh’s spunky and subversive art has kept, as she says, the “conversation going.”

Power Hierarchies

By her own admission, “Power and its hierarchies” are central to her work. She also explores the painful history of the diaspora, pouring personal identity and femalehood into her art. Like most people of colour, having faced racism first hand has only strengthened her commitment towards aspiring for a more equal world for all. Take the ‘Index of the Disappeared’, an online archive of the post-9/11 disappearances that she has doggedly maintained along with fellow artist Mariam Ghani since 2004 to keep what she calls the “immigration dialogue” alive.

This installation has multiple and overlapping aims: to reclaim queerdom and to challenge assumptions about identity, family, gender and appearance

America’s Wounds

Despite growing racism and ethnic conflict, a popular vision of America as a land of liberty and a mutliracial paradise persists in the Indian mind. “But the so-called diversity was never there. It was always like a Band-Aid on top of a huge wound,” she retorts. “Anybody who lives here who isn’t white has experienced racism. Period. Regardless of how rich they are. Hollywood stars still can’t hail a cab if they’re black. Even money doesn’t always protect you from racism.” Admitting that while in America she occupies an interesting position (“to see things from a non-majoritarian perspective”) she is an upper caste in India which shifts the dynamic completely. “Everybody’s identity is so complex these days,” she insists. “In America, especially, you have a unique framework for race where unfortunately the marking of people visually and racially comes first.”

At work: “I don’t conform,” she declares

‘QUEERPOWER’ will open in October 2020 and will be on view for nearly a year at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (LLMA) in New York (subject to the COVID-19 situation in America)