Chitra Ganesh, “Eyes of Time,” detail, mixed-media wall mural, 2015 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Brooklyn Museum
Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Herstory Gallery, fourth floor
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Thursday, March 26, free with museum admission, 6:00-9:30
Exhibition continues through July 12
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org
www.chitraganesh.com
eyes of time online slideshow
In her exceptional new site-specific installation, “Eyes of Time,” in the Brooklyn Museum’s Herstory Gallery, multimedia artist Chitra Ganesh investigates female divinity, multiplicity, and power, inspired by the goddess Kali, one of the women honored with a place setting in Judy Chicago’s seminal work “The Dinner Party,” the centerpiece of the museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, home to the Herstory Gallery. Ganesh, a lifelong Brooklynite, supplements her wall sculpture with selections from the museum’s collection, comprising contemporary works by Kiki Smith, Shoichi Ida, and Barbara Jones-Hogu as well as a small seventeenth-century Indian bronze of a standing Kali and an ancient Egyptian bronze of a seated Sekhmet. “In mythic tales both Sekhmet and Kali are connected to blood, death, destruction, and protection, and to fierce animals such as lions and tigers,” Ganesh writes in a wall label. “These qualities contrast with characteristics typically idealized in women today and point to the formidable roles played by the ancient goddesses.” About Louise Bourgeois’s 1996 drypoint, “Eyes,” Ganesh adds, “The third eye, as seen on Kali, has often been associated with supernatural powers in Indian mythology and continues to appear in contemporary imagery. The act of gazing into numerous eyes might also recall the practice of darshan, a dialectical and spiritual way of looking that considers the object as both image and living being, providing an experience of seeing that informs South Asian culture.”
Those explanations also offer just the right way to approach “Eyes of Time,” a sprawling mural of three women that covers one wall of the gallery. At the left is a contemporary figure holding a jagged, starlike piece of the universe over one eye while the other eye looks directly at the viewer. In the middle is a figure based on Kali, the goddess of time, change, and destruction, who has six arms, three legs, three breasts, and a skirt of severed arms of different colors. Words emerge from her long hair, including “quicksand,” “rainbows,” and “knowing.” One hand has an eyeball in its palm, one holds a whip, while another wields a blood-dripping scythe with an eye on it. Instead of a head, on her neck is the Grand Central clock, without its hands. And on the right is a science-fiction woman made out of such machine parts as gears and speakers laid out in a kind of architectural rendering. All three women, representing the past, the present, and the future, have shiny jewels embedded into their being, while two rows of decorated flags hang above them. In some ways, it’s like the three figures have escaped from Ganesh’s comic book Tales of Amnesia, which is also on view, giving three-dimensional life to these superhero characters. “These narrative devices allude to the power of multiple forms of femininity that coexist within the same frame and, at times, within a single being, as well as to darker aspects of Kali,” Ganesh writes about her 2002 book. On March 26, the Brooklyn Museum’s next edition of “Art Off the Wall” will celebrate “Eyes of Time” with an evening of special activities, consisting of an artist and curator talk with Ganesh and Saisha Grayson, a zine library inspired by Tales of Amnesia, screenings of three of Ganesh’s short films (Rabbithole; What Remains; My dreams, my works must wait till after hell…), a movement workshop with Ajna Dance Company, and a Bhangra dance party with DJ Rekha.
Who ever thought that little old Yiddish mensch Isaac Bashevis Singer was such a horndog? Asaf Galay and Shaul Betser begin The Muses of Bashevis Singer, their light and playful documentary, with the following quote from the Nobel Prize-winning author: “In my younger days I used to dream about a harem full of women. Lately I’m dreaming of a harem full of translators. If those translators could be women in addition, this would be paradise on earth.” Well, it seems that Singer, who was born in Poland in 1902, emigrated to the United States in 1935, and died in Florida in 1991 at the age of eighty-eight, found that paradise, as Galay and Betser meet with a series of women who were among many hand-picked by Singer, the man who nearly singlehandedly preserved Yiddish literature in the twentieth century, to serve as his translators, and not necessarily because of their language skills. “There were certain women who were more than just translators to him. It happened quite often,” says his Swedish publisher, Dorothea Bromberg, who also talks about Alma, Singer’s wife of more than fifty years. “He loved her, I’m sure, in his own way,” she adds. “She was very jealous of him, and she was completely right.” Galay and Betser meet with translators Eve Fridman, Evelyn Torton Beck, Dvorah Telushkin, Marie-Pierre Bay, Duba Leibell, and Dr. Bilha Rubenstein as well as Singer biographers Florence Noiville and Janet Hadda, his granddaughters Hazel Karr and Merav Chen-Zamir, Yentl the Yeshiva Boy playwright Leah Napolin, and his longtime secretary and proofreader, Doba Gerber, who share intimate, surprising tales about the author of such books as The Family Moskat, The Magician of Lublin, Shosha, and Enemies, a Love Story and such short stories as “Gimpel the Fool,” “A Friend of Kafka,” and “Zlateh the Goat.”
