HCMC – ‘Encounter’ Presents Chitra Ganesh

Lecture 1: Architectures of myth: Fri 20 Jun 2014, 6.30 – 8.30 pm
Room NZ0903 (9th Floor)
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Lecture 2: Visualizing absence: Tue 24 Jun 2014, 6.30 – 8.30 pm
Rm NZ0507 (5nd Floor)
Hoa Sen University

From the organizer:

‘ENCOUNTER’ talk series welcomes Chitra Ganesh, Brooklyn-based multimedia artist currently working in New Delhi, with two lectures in June 2014.

Lecture 1: Architectures of myth

This lecture will explore the power of key visual and storytelling devices central to mythological narrative and their particular ongoing legacy in contemporary visual and popular culture. I will begin by looking at the architecture of the grand epics of classical Eastern and Western traditions, such as Homer’s Odyssey, the Ramayana and the Monkey King story. I will also look at images drawn from contemporary modes of storytelling to illuminate how ancient mythic architectures persist in the language of comics and graphic novels and how they are transformed in contemporary visual forms, examining such examples as the Amar Chitra Katha and Raj comics originating in India, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series and the graffiti and science fictional tales such as Battlestar Galactica.

Lecture 2: Visualizing absence

This lecture will consider how contemporary art practices take up the problem of visualizing absence by archiving and creating around social and political erasure. As artists and thinkers, how do we identify and respond to stories, social histories, and conflicts which we experience as crucial to our understanding of our own history, nation, or family, but yet seem difficult to extract from the public domain, or remain mysteriously absent from official records? I will frame this discussion via projects, challenges and key questions that animate ‘Index of the Disappeared’, a ten year collaborative project that is both a visual practice and discursive platform that foregrounds the difficult histories of immigrant, ‘Other’, and dissenting communities in the United States since September 11, 2001 – including a rapidly changing relationship to surveillance, illegal imprisonment and targeting extra-judicial killings. Through official documents, secondary literature, images, and personal narratives, we trace the ways in which censorship and data blackouts are part of a discursive shift to secrecy.

Language: English and Vietnamese translation will be provided

The event is free of charge. Seats inside the auditorium are limited. Please arrange to come early for the best available position.

Chitra Ganesh is a Brooklyn based artist currently living and working in New Delhi. Her drawing, installation, text-based work, and collaborations seek to excavate and circulate buried narratives typically excluded from official canons of history, literature, and art. Ganesh graduated from Brown University with a BA in Comparative Literature and Art-Semiotics, and received her MFA from Columbia University in 2002.

Ganesh’s work has been widely exhibited at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art (Shanghai), Brooklyn Museum of Art, Museum voorModerneKunst (Netherlands), ZKM (Germany), Royal College of Art (London), Prince of Wales Museum (Mumbai), and KunsthalleExnergrasse (Norway), etc…

Ganesh is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a 2012 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in the Creative Arts.

Image credit: Chitra Ganesh, ‘Atlas’ 2013 (detail), Archival Lightjet Print, 127 × 175.3 cm