Gallery Wendi Norris presents a solo booth of work by Chitra Ganesh, featuring an immersive installation of her 2018 series titled "Sultana's Dream". On view will be 27 Linocut prints in narrative sequence around the three walls of the booth, and an audio recording overhead.
"Sultana's Dream" is a large-scale narrative suite inspired by a 1905 feminist utopian text written by a Bengali writer and social reformer, Rokeya Sakhhawat Hussain. The story illustrates an alternative future in which gender roles in India are reversed and women occupy broad-ranging positions of power. For this complex, multi-process project, Ganesh's visual research spans depictions of utopia, Islamic architecture, 19th century scientific instruments, turn-of-the-century Bengal, Afro-futurism, and narratives of national and feminist liberation.
The prints will be published as a limited edition book by Durham Press in 2019, with an introductory essay by Saisha Grayson, curator of time-based media at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
