For this exhibition, Chitra Ganesh premières a new large-scale animation titled Journey to the Great Below, inspired by what is widely considered to be the world’s oldest recorded myth, The Descent of Inanna into the Underworld. Written c. 1900–1600 BCE in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), the story follows Inanna, the Sumerian Goddess of love, fecundity and war, also known as the ‘Queen of Heaven’, on her treacherous journey to face her sister (and darker half) Ereshkigal, the ‘Queen of the Underworld’. The poem describes Inanna’s confrontation with death and her eventual return to the world of the living.
Chitra Ganesh’s practice is rooted in drawing and painting and has a distinctive multidisciplinary approach. Over the past twenty-five years, she has developed an expansive body of work that encompasses wall drawings, collage, animation, installation and sculpture.
Informed by her studies in literature, semiotics, and contemporary social theory, her visual vocabulary also draws from histories of surrealism, science fiction, anime, and South Asian visual culture including ancient statuary, popular Indian comics and graphic design.
Ganesh creates richly layered worlds that probe epic myths and historical narratives to offer speculative visions of society. Reorienting traditional forms of storytelling around queer and femme protagonists, Ganesh’s world building explores themes such as psychic transformation, sexuality, power, and loss. Centring figures that have long been marginalised, her shape-shifting characters occupy liminal spaces, inviting us to consider utopian possibilities in moments of precarity and turbulence.
