2018: The Year According to Chitra Ganesh

Chitra Ganesh’s drawing-based practice brings to light narrative representations of femininity, sexuality, and power typically absent from canons of literature and art. Her installations, animations, prints, and drawings take historical and mythic texts as inspiration and points of departure to complicate received ideas of iconic female forms, allowing untold stories to rise to the surface. Her vocabulary draws from surrealism, expressionism, mythic iconographies, and pictorial forms such as Kalighat and Madhubani painting, connecting these with contemporary mass-mediated visual languages comics and science fiction. In 2018 Ganesh had solo exhibitions at Rubin Museum, The Kitchen, and the Times Square Arts Alliance, with previous solo exhibitions including MoMA PS1, the Andy Warhol Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and the Gothenburg Kunsthalle. Her work is on view through March 29, 2019, in the fourth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Bienniale in India.

1.
DISCOVERY OF THE WORLD’S OLDEST (KNOWN) FIGURATIVE PAINTING

The painting of a wild cow with horns was discovered in a cave in Borneo last month and dates to at least 40,000 years ago—tens of thousands of years earlier than similar examples in Europe. It supplements the 2002 discovery of world’s oldest drawing in Blombos Cave, South Africa, where 73,000 years ago (if not more) an early human created abstract designs by applying ochre crayon to stone, forming patterns that resemble today’s hashtag symbol. Taken together, these discoveries reconfigure art history’s entire origin story. I am floored by how much we still don’t know, with fresh knowledge showing that all fingers point again to the importance of decentering Europe, America, and whiteness in how we understand (the history of) art.

2.
ASMR VIDEOS

As one of the only people I know who does not find television relaxing, I discovered and derived great pleasure from watching ASMR videos and their offshoots, especially as news and politics became increasingly unbearable in 2018. Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is the term to describe a group of soothing sensations, including “low grade euphoria” and a pleasurable tingles that pass over one’s body head to toe, stimulated by specific audio and visual stimuli, such as whispering, or ambient sounds of a cooking process and process-oriented everyday tasks. The form itself struck me as a contemporary roadmap for collective transformation via skills sharing and amplifying voices that are often unheard, and inspired a generative installation of community and internet-sourced DIY videos for my solo exhibition at the Kitchen, Her Garden, a Mirror.” Here is a delightful offshoot of my ASMR journey:

3.
“GAY SEX” IS DECRIMINALIZED IN INDIA (AT LAST)

The Supreme Court of India legalized gay sex by overturning the portion of the Indian Penal Code that, amongst other things, criminalized consensual “gay sex” between adults. The Victorian origins of the law were clear in its language, which technically criminalized “carnal intercourse against the order of nature.” This hard-won victory comes on the heels of close to 25 years of grassroots activism. The first legal challenge against the law was filed in 1993. It is a testament to the courage and perseverance of India’s LGBT communities, and to the strength of social movements in India. Two favorite quotes from the judgment: “Criminalising carnal intercourse under section 377 Indian penal code is irrational, indefensible and manifestly arbitrary,” and the lovely Leonard Cohen lyric, “From the ashes of the gay/democracy is coming.” A truly joyous moment of the year.

4.
#THEFUTUREISBROWNANDFEMALE

The 2018 midterm elections, with an historic number of women of color, LGBTQ, refugee and first generation candidates winning. This image says it all.

5.
CLIMATE CHANGE

There is no shortage of examples detailing its horrific destruction affecting every global region in major, minor, and unbelievably haunting ways. Three weeks ago, I had long overdue catchup conversations with two close girlfriends on opposite sides of the globe—one in northern California and one in New Delhi. Both conversations ended with reports of difficulty breathing, of talk about gas masks, respirators, air purifiers, who is buying what, and how everyone who can was using them regularly. From the California wildfires to toxic levels of pollution in many major cities, including New Delhi, 2018 has felt truly apocalyptic. Extreme heat waves, droughts, flash floods, hurricanes, uncontainable oil spills, or rising carbon emissions, climate precarity endangering farmers around the world: it impacts everything from the cedars of Lebanon to starvation and endangerment of polar bears. There has been a sharp rise in climate-related deaths of all living creatures. Human-made climate devastation is definitely the year’s grim reaper.

6.
LIKE LIFE: SCULPTURE, COLOR, AND THE BODY (1300–NOW)

I loved this exhibition’s intermingling of the ancient and contemporary, alongside shifting ideas of what constitutes classical beauty and the grotesque. It reminds us that we can journey with works like this through time, and across the gamut of visceral impulses that the human body can conjure.

7.
RESTITUTION REPORT, FRANCE

I remember having a physical reaction akin to dizziness and nausea when I encountered a displaced Moai statue at the British Museum, stolen more than 150 years ago from Easter Island. This year, President Emmanuel Macron commissioned a Restitution Report as a first step in France’s repatriation of colonial African artifacts. Senegalese writer and economist Felwine Sarr and the French art historian Bénédicte Savoy worked from March to November of 2018 on a 108-page report. It gave a strong recommendation that France must begin the fraught process of returning Sub-Saharan African art and artifacts taken without consent during French colonial rule from the 19th century through the 1960s. Seventy thousand African objects are currently held in France’s Quai Branly Museum alone. This is no surprise, as 90 percent of Africa’s cultural heritage is currently held in institutions outside the continent, primarily stolen and looted as a result of the colonial encounter. The report is a trailblazing call to action for similar processes to commence worldwide. It has already resulted in initiating the return of 26 bronze sculptures from Benin and the arrival of a convoy from Easter Island to England last month to beg for the return of their stolen Moai statue. What say you, British Museum?

8.
CHITTAPROSAD: A RETROSPECTIVE

Chittaprosad’s retrospective at DAG New York, which followed a presentation of the artist’s work at Documenta 14, contained a wonderful selection of the artist’s drawings and prints spanning decades. Known for documenting the Bengal Famine (1943–1944), Chittaprosad (1915–1978) bore first-hand witness to the devastation that killed more than three million people. This retrospective highlights a new interest in setting the historical record straight about the real cause of the famine, which actually stemmed from a British governmental policy, initiated by Winston Churchill, that diverted grain from India to British troops abroad. A self-taught artist and an active Communist Party member, Chittaprosad’s work included stark critiques of global capitalism, caste-based violence, income inequality, war mongering, and imperial domination. His oeuvre recalls the works of his contemporary Franz Masereel, as well as of Emory Douglas’s and Elizabeth Catlett’s prints, and contemporary graphic artists such as Molly Crabapple and Joe Sacco. Amazing.

9.
TOWARDS AN INTERSECTIONAL AMERICAN HISTORY

With 2018’s record number of undocumented children detained in prison-like conditions, migrants teargassed at the US border, black people continuing to die at the hands of law enforcement, and an ongoing fight to enact a Muslim ban, I’ve been reading to connect these dots through lesser-known American histories. I’m learning about how Jim Crow laws and the Asian Exclusion Act were slowly and strategically rolled out at the same time: during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The multiple exclusionary measures of economic and housing segregation, coupled with a ban on Asian immigration from 1917 to 1965, created unexpected communities that thrived and eventually and became obscured by the annals of history. The South Asian American Digital Archive and Vivek Bald’s book Bengali Harlem tell some of these stories. Bald chronicles how the first Bengali men who migrated to the US often lived, worked, married, and loved in African American neighborhoods in New Jersey, New Orleans, Harlem, and the Bronx. Neither black nor white, they were regularly misclassified—and often disappeared in Census counts. #historyrepeatsitself #wewerealwayshere

10.
FUTURE TECHNOLOGIES AND LOST KINGDOMS

Using LiDAR, a newer process of 3D laser mapping technology that uses refracted beams to create topographic images, scientists in 2018 uncovered a magnitude and stretch of the Mayan Empire that was previously unknown. More than 60,000 structures—including a seven-story pyramid and adjoining complex—and an intricate network of roads were discovered under the present-day Guatemalan jungle, with more than 800 square miles surveyed and mapped from a helicopter with LiDAR technology.

Says Francisco Estrada-Belli, director of the Holmul Archaeological Project:

Seen as a whole, terraces and irrigation channels, reservoirs, fortifications and causeways reveal an astonishing amount of land modification done by the Maya over their entire landscape on a scale previously unimaginable.

Move over Game of Thrones, here comes history.