Brooklyn-based artist Chitra Ganesh recently unveiled a large public video installation at New York’s Penn Station, part of the “Art at Amtrak” rotating exhibition series curated by award-winning public art curator Debra Simon and her team. Known for his distinctive graphic and comedic style, Ganesh combines South Asian iconography with science fiction and queer feminist theory. Her work celebrates feminine energy and ancestral symbols, promoting a deep symbiosis between living beings, starting with the reconnection of the inner self.
In this commission, Ganesh created Renewala highly symbolic video narrative focusing on the regenerative powers of plants. The immersive video is designed to remind passengers of a healthy life that thrives in nature and reconnects them with, as the artist puts it, elements that transcend human boundaries, encouraging a renewal of perspective and a reset of both mind and body.
This marks the first time that the “Art at Amtrak” series, which previously featured works in the Amtrak Rotunda and 8th Avenue Concourse, has installed art in the Hilton Corridor. The Observer spoke to Ganesh at the launch of the installation, which coincides with his other video work, Compatibilityis on view at the Moynihan Train Hall through October 14.
Chitra, your video works combine many aspects of your figurative and visual language. Plants, and certain plants and species, appear to be purposefully symbolic in the story you created. For example, the Rose of Jericho and the Welwitschia plant in Southwest Africa symbolize resilience, while others are native to the NYC area. How would you describe the importance of plants in your story, and how do they serve as metaphors for broader social events throughout human history?
I use plants from many regions around the world to emphasize people’s consistent recognition and association of plants with healing, regeneration, growth, resilience and memory. It seems especially important to remember that we humans are in a symbiotic relationship with plants—as we live in an unprecedented era of climate destruction that threatens dozens of species around the world to extinction. Plants have always been at the forefront of human consciousness as a metaphor for life cycles and the measure of life and time in nature is much bigger than we think everyday.
I’ve also become interested in how the qualities of certain plants are perceived similarly across cultures, sometimes with multiple and universal resonances. Two examples are the calla lily and the dandelion. CThe alla lily originated in South Africa and then migrated around the world. In Greek and Roman iconography, their chalice-like shape represented rebirth and good fortune. In Mexican culture, they have been associated with purity and rebirth, often seen in historical paintings depicting Easter. I was also inspired by Diego Rivera’s use of calla lilies in his large paintings and drawings, symbolizing rebirth and transformation, as works between 1920 and 1940 were created during the Mexican Revolution.
Dandelions, to me as a New Yorker, are symbols of resilience, survival and prosperity despite the harsh conditions of urban grit like cement and asphalt. In Scandinavian culture, words in Norwegian and Swedish refer to the energy of the dandelion. For example, “maskrosbarn,” which means “dandelion child,” refers to someone who has a difficult childhood and still appears to be good, like a dandelion breaking through the asphalt. Swedes have long talked about “dandelion” children, which are “normal” or “healthy” children with “strong” genes who can do well almost anywhere, whether they are raised in the size of a side crack or a well-kept garden, explained the Atlantic article.
As you shared in the press release accompanying this important work, your first encounter with art as a child was in an urban environment. How do you feel this street language has influenced your artistic style, and how would you describe it today?
There are many ways that street art has greatly influenced my work. My relationship with public transport is long and rich. I started riding the subway to school by myself when I was ten years old, in the 5th grade. Before coming to New York, my parents were natives of Calcutta, India, a large and busy city, and lifelong lovers of public transportation. My mother never had a driver’s license, and my father loved his metro card so much that he continued to ride Brooklyn buses until his death.
In many ways, street art, such as Keith Haring’s chalk drawings of graffiti-covered billboards in subway stations and tunnels or subway cars that characterized the 1970s and ’80s, was the first site-specific art I ever saw. he saw. Long before I entered the museum, I was involved in the movement, high color and power of making such works, which were larger than life scale. They were a big part of my gateway to combining graphic beauty and concise presentations of my work.
Public art has a unique and beautiful quality to it that has the potential to provide an even deeper and deeper experience of visual art than we can have in institutions such as museums or galleries. Seeing art in a museum or gallery is most likely (though not always) a one-time thing—you go to an exhibition. Seeing a work of art in a place you visit regularly, perhaps a few times a week or a month, is a musical experience. That is, you participate in the work through various emotions and attitudes, and depending on your emotional climate, you receive different transfers from the work and have a deep relationship with it by being able to look and be creative again and again. It becomes part of both your outdoor and indoor environment. That is a very deep aspect of public art historically that is closely related to how people deal with religious art in the places they used to visit.
As an emerging artist in the early 1990s, I was deeply inspired by the works of New York-based artists such as Basquiat, Brazilian artists OSGEMEOS and West Coast artists such as Barry McGee and Margaret Kilgallen, all of whom created a singular aesthetic. from graffiti and freight train hopping culture. I love art in airports, art in subways and chalk drawings my neighbors’ kids do on the streets outside my apartment.
Much of your work shows the psychological and spiritual connection between inner and outer dimensions, between the unconscious and the world of the senses. How do you feel the video allowed you to explore this dimension further?
Video and animation have been important media for exploring the interaction between interior and exterior spaces in a place where the collective and the singular or social and psychological realities meet. Drawing-based animation offers incredible power to explore the intersection of complex worlds. In Compatibilitythe silhouettes of the figures are placed against the green world, and inside the bodies, we can see an equally rich and different environment. In this sense, bodies themselves become portals to another dimension. Portals have been an important aspect of my work as of late; they are a genre that allows for the compression of time and space, allowing the audience to traverse vastly different realms and temporalities within the blink of an eye. They also allow us to see that multiple realities, states of mind or universes can exist simultaneously. This idea of seeing many different places or ways of being at once seems important to me in our time—for example, where we are fed information using predetermined algorithms that limit and organize what information we may access and where we are charged. of navigating a divided and tense political environment. There is also multidirectional movement within each frame; for example, the expanding cosmos inside the body while the unicorn rides on the back or walks into the forest within a silhouette paired with plants and animals from the painted forest scene.
The place where those videos are shown is a crossroads where many people of different backgrounds and many other lives pass. What stories and experiences do you want to remember and bring to this space?
I want to give anxious, busy and anxious travelers a moment of relaxation that gives them a place to breathe from the anxiety-driven process from A to B. Unfortunately, that’s an ingrained part of New York City commuter life. Perhaps engaging with certain moments of beauty and expression of natural beauty—in worlds that exist outside and outside of major transit hubs like Penn Station—allows for some breathing room and reset that will bring peace and joy to a charged environment. , a busy and challenging place. This is by engaging with moments of relaxation, such as someone who stares nearby, handing them a small olive plant, hands reaching for butterflies or a little girl scattering dandelion seeds. In parallel, this pausing or holding one’s breath becomes real as viewers are invited to have a reciprocal relationship with the figures on the screen.
The installation consists of two separate chapters: Compatibility again Renewal. How do those differ or function as narrative continuations?
Both invite the audience to consider a wider time and place that may evoke beauty and joy, speak to the power of endurance and survival despite threats of destruction. This sounds like a powerful metaphor for reaching a time on Earth where there is so much natural death going on and actions leading to extinction through military violence, extractive fossil fuel processes and emissions in places around the world, as well as here at home.
Chitra Ganesh’s photo Renewal it is visible at New York’s Penn Station as part of the “Art at Amtrak” series hosted by Debra Simon.
