Anima Mundi by Chitra Ganesh - Creative Time Comics
Ganesh’s drawing-based practice brings to light narrative representations of femininity, sexuality, and power typically absent from canons of literature and art. Her wall installations, comics, charcoal drawings, and mixed media works on paper often expand upon historical and mythic texts as both inspiration and a point of departure to complicate received ideas of iconic female forms. Her vocabulary draws from surrealism, expressionism, Hindu and Buddhist iconography, and South-Asian pictorial forms, which she connects with contemporary visual languages of mass media, including comics, science fiction, and illustration. Her upcoming projects include the 2020-21 Queer Power Facade Commission at the Leslie-Lohman Museum. Ganesh lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
In the early days of the COVD-19 pandemic, we re-introduced Creative Time Comics as a digital platform to forefront artist’s responses to the global shifts - be they mental, political, health, or economic - happening around us. As we shared the comics on our social media platform, we realized that they are an incredible and practical device to make sense and reflect on the ever-changing world, beyond the pandemic. We are pleased to continue sharing Creative Time Comics as periodically as a means for communicating complex ideas about society and honoring the medium’s long history of expressing the zeitgeist in times of war, distress, and upheaval.
Creative Time Comics also affirms the vital importance of artists’ voices in shaping contemporary discourse, while exploring the digital realm as an expansive and dynamic public space. The resulting works are released on Creative Time’s Instagram account and featured on our website and other social media platforms.
Creative Time Comics 2020 references our long history of interpreting digital platforms as forms of public space, and calling on artists to provide critical perspectives on current events. From the first iteration of Creative Time Comics in 2010, to our global initiative Creative Time Reports, we have long championed work that can circulate widely without physical proximity, and that transforms individual viewership into collective experience.