An Indian in a Box

A live durational performance installation presenting issues of enslavement, voyeurism, fetishization and isolation as experienced by the victims of Human Zoos, also known as Ethnological Expositions - a shameful practice that endured during the colonial era, which continued into the 1950s, and as late as the 1990’s in some countries across Europe. 

Captured and confined in a museum cabinet and bound in Georgian garments, Chakravarthi presents himself as a living object of curiosity and an exoticised creature.  

6th October 2022  Festival of Contemporary Arts - City of Women City Art Gallery Ljubljana

14th July - 15th July 2022 Fierce Festival, Birmingham Botanical Gardens

6th September – 10th September 2021 Duckie, Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens

Negrophilia is a comprehensively documented Euro-American fascination with African and Black diasporic cultures. The allure continues to be prevalent in European cultures through other forms and guises, from academia to Art and popular culture. This performance is an exploration of the Parisian avant-garde culture of the 1920s and its fascination with Africanism (Negrophilia), whilst also referencing Hollywood cinema of the same era such as I Walked With A Zombie, Cat People and King Kong, surrealist artists such Man Ray and Méret Oppenheim, and Darwin’s illustrations of evolution, encapsulated through the image and political discourses of Josephine Baker.

(Mistress of melody Miss Amy Lamé introduces a hit parade of short sharp performance and in-between the acts plays pure pop, rock’n’roll and northern soul.)

Barflies (video installation 2003) is a seminal three-screen installation performed by Chakravarthi offering representations of the different investments in femininities embodied by Transvestites/Cross dressers, the pleasures, fears and dangers of being in public 'en femme' and the particular dialectic relationship they have with the heterosexual male. Barflies was screened for most recently for LADA's Just Like A Woman programme for the City of Women Festival (Slovenia, 2013).

LADA marked its 15th anniversary in 2014, which it celebrated with a series of initiatives across the year. The anniversary activities provided an opportunity to reflect on the seismic shifts in Live Art practices and discourses that had taken place since 1999 through the lens of the Agency and its work.

For LADA’s 15th Anniversary limited edition series, George Chakravarthi has produced a mounted triptych of prints derived from his Barflies project. 

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Gallery open Wednesday to Saturday 12 PM - 5 PM

Evoking death, drama and identity, George Chakravarthi re-imagines thirteen characters in Shakespeare’s plays who met their ends through suicide.

This is the second time Thirteen has been shown outside the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, where the exhibition was originally shown.

Thirteen is a series of powerful self-portraits presented as light boxes in which Chakravarthi assumes the roles of some of Shakespeare's doomed characters, including Mark Antony, Othello, Lady Macbeth, Ophelia, Cleopatra, and Romeo and Juliet. In doing so, Chakravarthi explores themes of ambiguity of gender and masking of identity, often central to Shakespeare’s plays.

Chakravarthi says, “Changing perceptions of suicide seemed fertile and contemporary territory for exploration, especially in the context of our current political history and the direct connection to Shakespeare's representation of death as an act of valour, terror, passion and love.”

Using himself as a starting point, Chakravarthi worked behind the scenes with the Royal Shakespeare Company’s costume department to dramatically reconstruct his identity and take on the guise of each character. Each image is layered with multiple textures and surfaces drawn from diverse sources including cobwebs, mould and precious stones. The result of this painstaking process is a series of complex jewel-like images mounted in light boxes, which glow with colour and rich texture, recalling stained glass, monuments or tombs.

Globe Gallery Link

39 Pilgrim Street

Newcastle upon Tyne

NE1 6QE

Telephone: +44 (0) 191 261 8281

Email: rashida@globegallery.org

Artist talk, Impressions Gallery, Bradford UK 2014

RSC exhibition guide

Download brochure (PDF)

part of The Collective

Western culture has long associated the left with evil, a belief that has been reinforced by Christianity. Though it is difficult to pinpoint any specific reference to this in the Bible, the devil is depicted as being left-handed, saints are said to have refused feed from their mother’s left breast and painters of the Last Judgment depict God pointing to heaven with His right hand and to hell with His left. Eastern religions/spiritual imagery, mostly, tend to focus on union, equilibrium, balance and symmetry, aspiring to an ambidextrous philosophy.

Algorithmic, fractal and recalling spiritual architecture, this new work, (part of a new, ongoing visual research, ‘The Ambidextrous Universe’), examines the deterioration of the body caused by disease, the blossoming of recovery and the alleviation of epiphanies.

The House of St Barnabas

1 Greek Street

London W1D 4NQ

By appointment only: reservations@hosb.org.uk

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