Rabbithole
2010 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
2:54 minutes
Chitra Ganesh
Rabbithole by Chitra Ganesh is a digital animation that refigures a fundamental plot device in myths and fables. Referencing iconic folklore such as Alice in Wonderland, the Odyssey, and the Mahabharata, Ganesh’s video illustrates the story of a hero’s journey and transformation that is not driven by the glory of violent conquest or saving a damsel in distress. Ganesh’s short video features a colorful style of illustration specific to the artist’s comic works. The setting is a hallucinatory landscape, with an equally psychedelic instrumental score created by Karsh Kale. With a human head, the protagonist is otherwise an amalgamation of reconfigured body parts: a second face protrudes from their right side, a sideways eyeball replaces their torso, secondary hands sprout from their shoulders, and their legs are truncated at the thigh. The main character is flanked by several other part-animal/part-human figures and a pair of floating, bodiless arms. There are various symbols and forms that repeat throughout the video, most importantly the eye and similarly shaped lacerations that are cut onto the figures’ bodies and the earth. The protagonist falls into a red gash that appears in the grass and opens up a portal to a dark underworld filled with organs and flowers. They then return to the material world, physically and psychically altered, with a third eye on their forehead. In Buddhism, the opening of the third eye is achieved through enlightenment or higher consciousness. Rabbithole moves beyond conventional mythic narratives to consider a cyclical journey through the material world that initiates a psychic transformation for the protagonist.
Spanning printmaking, sculpture, and video, Chitra Ganesh’s work draws from broad-ranging material and historic reference points, including surrealism, expressionism, Hindu, Greek and Buddhist iconographies, South Asian pictorial traditions, 19th-century European portraiture and fairy tales, comic books, song lyrics, science fiction, Bollywood posters, news and media images. The process of automatic writing is central to the practice of the Indian-American artist and emerges from dissecting myths to retrieve critical moments of abjection, desire, and loss. By layering disparate materials and visual languages, Ganesh considers alternate narratives of sexuality and power.
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