On November 5, 2025, The Block Museum welcomed artist Chitra Ganesh for a public conversation celebrating the 2024–25 Student Acquisition: three prints from She the Question, her vivid series originally published as a 24-page comic book. Known for her subversive visual language, Ganesh draws from pop culture, science fiction, mythology, and Indian visual traditions to challenge dominant narratives around gender, sexuality, and power.

Ganesh was joined in conversation by Lakshmi Padmanabhan, assistant professor in Radio, TV, and Film, for a discussion that explored mythology, futurism, embodiment, and the politics of visual archives. The program was moderated by Laura Brueck, professor of South Asian and Comparative Literature and director of the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. Block Museum Student Associates Keya Soni Chaudhuri and Tori Montinola opened the evening with reflections on the student-led process that brought Ganesh’s prints into The Block’s growing collection.

“So many origin stories imagine the body fantastically fragmented and then re-formed. That feels like a metaphor for how we move through life. We take things apart, we reassemble them, and each time we become something slightly different.”
— Chitra Ganesh

Throughout the evening, Ganesh reflected on the recurring presence of hybrid and fragmented bodies in her work, connecting them to creation stories, science fiction worlds, and the experience of living through change. She described time in her practice as spiraling rather than sequential, noting that many myths and speculative stories begin in the middle and loop back on themselves. This nonlinear approach, she explained, creates room for uncertainty, transformation, and imaginative possibility.

Ganesh also discussed the visual culture that shaped her early imagination, including the Amar Chitra Katha comics she encountered as a child. Revisiting these images later in life revealed narrative and representational absences that prompted her to rework dominant stories through feminist, queer, and decolonial frameworks. Surrealism, she added, offered a powerful way to “break apart the rules of language and image” and to create space for other ways of seeing and knowing.

The conversation highlighted Ganesh’s movement across media, from intimate drawings to murals and animation. She spoke about how scale, tactility, and material choices shape the emotional and conceptual space of each work. “The questions stay constant,” she said, “but each medium gives me a different dimension of an answer.”

Block Museum Student Associates shared how these ideas resonated with their own research and decision-making. As part of their annual acquisition project, the Associates study museum collecting practices and recommend works of art that invite reflection, inquiry, and dialogue. Their selection of Ganesh’s work underscores the power of student-driven curation in shaping The Block’s collection and future exhibitions.

This program was co-sponsored by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities and presented with the support of the South Asia Research Forum.