Chitra Ganesh | Architects of the Future | 2014 | Durham Press Limited Edition Fine Art Prints and Multiples

CHITRA GANESH | ARCHITECTS OF THE FUTURE

Durham Press is proud to present Chitra Ganesh's first portfolio of prints, titled Architects of the Future. The portfolio consists of four woodblock and screenprints, with the addition of goldleaf, in an edition of twenty-five. Each print measures 25 ¾ inches in height and range from 18 to 44 inches in width, combining between fifteen and forty impressions each.

In her drawing, painting, installation, text, and film works, Ganesh excavates histories that typically have been excluded from the canons of literature and art. She draws from a broad range of material, including the iconography of Hindu, Greek and Buddhist mythology, 19th-century European portraiture and fairytales, song lyrics, as well as contemporary visual culture such as Bollywood posters, anime, and comic books. Through a process of automatic writing, Ganesh probes these sources and narratives to uncover moments of absence and submerged desire.

In Architects of the Future, Ganesh integrates the visual language of 60s and 70s science fiction with imagery loosely inspired by the Amar Chitra Katha, an Indian publisher of graphic novels and comics founded in 1967 that focuses on stories, folktales, and epics from Indian culture. Amar Chitra Katha's aim is to teach Indian children about their cultural heritage, started after founder Anant Pai realized that Indian children knew more about European folklore and mythology than their own. In Architects of the Future, Ganesh continues this tradition of disseminating Indian culture through a graphic novel format.

The four prints in Architects of the Future form a nonlinear narrative of "unforeseen desire and untimely loss" that occur in an alternate world in an imagined past and a distant future. Within this retro-futurist universe, bodies, like time, are fluid - they are doubled, dismembered, exceeding their limits and extending into their surroundings. By exploring bodies, space, and history through disparate visual languages, Ganesh asks her viewers to seek and consider alternate narratives of sexuality and power. There are always untold stories trying to rise to the surface.

Architects of the Future is available as a set or as individual prints directly through Durham Press. For more information, please contact sales@durhampress.com.