“Three Ways of Looking at Death in the face”
This piece is by chitra ganesh, a queer desi artist who often creates a lot of installations like this involving bodies meshing with technology, like with electronics spilling out of bodies like this. She focuses on portraying desi womxn, queerness, gendered oppression, I see themes like challenging colonialism, racist violences, trauma, honoring mental health, illness, and struggles with selflove and family also often in her work. I wanted to share this piece “Three Ways of Looking at Death in the face” that I feel reflects the blur between humxn and machine. The fact that it is called three ways of looking at death in the face for me implies humxness as a symbol of “life”, heart & pulse and machinery as a symbol of “lifelessness”. This piece shows humxness & machinery intertwined and links it with looking at death. I wonder what Chitra Ganesh was thinking as she made this. I wonder if this reflects her relationship to technology and what she means when she says death? Also often times she has multiple eyes in her pieces or a camera pointing to a body. I feel like this use of many eyes and camera represents surveillance by oppressive forces like the government. This makes me think about machines as a vehicle of surveillance on bodies and flesh and machines as possibles form of raciliazed, gendered (etc) policing.
-Preyanka Kataria