| George Chakravarthi | |
| Birth Date: | 1969 11, df=yes |
| Birth Place: | New Delhi, India |
| Nationality: | British (formerly Indian) |
| Occupation: | Artist |
| Years Active: | 1998 to present |
| Website: | www.georgechakravarthi.com |
George Chakravarthi is a multi-disciplinary artist working with photography, video, painting and performance. His work addresses the politics of identity including race, sexuality and gender, and also religious iconography among other subjects. He was born in India and moved to London, England in 1980.
He has exhibited and performed all over the UK and internationally at venues including Site Gallery, Sheffield, England; Tate Modern, London, England; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England; Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt, Germany; Dance Academy (Tilburg), Tilburg, Netherlands; Queens Gallery, British Council, New Delhi, India; La Casa Encendida, Madrid, Spain; Brut Künstlerhaus, Vienna, Austria; Abrons Arts Center, New York City, USA; and City Art Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Chakravarthi has been commissioned by the BBC, Artangel, Duckie, InIVA, the Arts Council of England, the British Council, the SPILL Festival of Performance, the Live Art Development Agency, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the Royal Shakespeare Company.[1]
Chakravarthi studied at the University of Brighton, the Royal Academy of Arts and the Royal College of Art.[2]
Chakravarthi was born in New Delhi, India on 26 November 1969 to parents with origins in Tamil Nadu, India and British Burma. His parents considered the education of their children a priority, so the family lived very modestly in order for him and his siblings to be privately educated while in India. Chakravarthi attended St. Columba's School, Delhi,[3] an English-medium school run by a Roman Catholic brotherhood (Congregation of Christian Brothers). Although nominally brought up as a Catholic, Chakravarthi's family encouraged him to absorb and be influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism.[4] [5]
In 1980, Chakravarthi moved with his family to the UK. This was around the time of the Brixton and other riots,[6] and the peaks for organised racism and electoral success of the far-right (National Front General election results in May 1979). Mary Brennan, reviewing the National Review of Live Art in 2001, described the effect on Chakravarthi of his move to the UK as follows: He continued his education at St. Patrick's Primary School[7] and St. Paul's Secondary School in south London, both Roman Catholic, multi-cultural schools. He began documenting his reactions to his new environment and his changing identity through writing and drawing, and then making photographic self-portraits (initially using photo booths[8] [9] until he was given a camera by the sculptor and photographer Hamish Horsley[10]).
Chakravarthi left home at the age of 16 and eventually settled in a modest flat in Greenwich, London. He had a variety of jobs including stacking shelves in supermarkets, as a go-go dancer in various nightclubs and as a photographic and artist's model. He attended a short course in photography at the Thames Independent Photography Project (TIPP) where his interest in photography and particularly making self-portraits was encouraged.
Chakravarthi was an undergraduate at the University of Brighton. He obtained a first-class Bachelor of Arts in Visual and Performance Art. For the degree show he submitted ′Resurrection′ (a photograph 12 feet by 5 feet) and a live performance, the subject of both was The Last Supper, with Chakravarthi in the place of Jesus and women dressed in saris in the positions of the disciples, as depicted by Leonardo da Vinci.[11] He received an award from Nagoya University for outstanding artistic achievement.
He started his postgraduate studies at the Royal Academy of Arts and,[12] after taking a year out, he completed his Master of Arts at the Royal College of Art in 2003. For the final show at the Royal College of Art, he submitted ′Olympia′, a video installation based on the painting by Édouard Manet, with Chakravarthi in the position of the nude woman and a white man in the place of the black servant woman;[13] it won him the Chris Garnham Award for 'Best Use of Photography'.
| Name of work/ Type | Date/ Commission | Exhibitions or performances | Description | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Remotecontrol (Video installation) | 1997 |
| Chakravarthi as an androgynous person inspired by fashion photography and the politics of an 'ideal body'. | ||
| Memorabilia/Aradhana (Video installation) | 1998 |
| An homage to Bollywood cinema. Chakravarthi plays both characters and it reflects the typical style and content of popular Indian cinema of the 1980s. However, the subtitles confront sexist assumptions and patriarchy. | ||
| Genesis (Video installation) | 1998 |
| Filmed in real-time, Chakravarthi reveals a series of emotions from happiness to extreme sadness."[A] large-scale video projection of face and upper body, proudly showcases the artist's body, while offering a more intimate emotional aspect, which destabilises Western codes of behaviour." – Fine Art Visiting Speaker Forum[18] | ||
| Introjection (Video installation) | 1998 |
| "A short film about narcissism, identity, self-image, internal reflection and loss." – George Chakravarthi[19] | ||
| Resurrection (Live performance) | 1998 |
| Chakravarthi, with a shaved head and naked, takes the position of Jesus in the Last Supper tableau as painted by Leonardo da Vinci, and he is accompanied by twelve female disciples wearing saris. Hair is strewn over the table. | ||
| Resurrection (Photographic) | 1998 |
| Still image of posed version of the live performance above. | ||
| Shakti (Video installation) | 2000 | Chakravarthi as an hybrid combination of Mona Lisa and the Indian goddess Kali with a landscape of naked women in the background. | |||
| Barflies (Triptych video installation) |
| Chakravarthi as three specific types of transgender women filmed in bars with a soundtrack of conversations on a telephone chat line between the artist and other transvestites and those that seek them."George Chakravarthi is what is politely known as a bundle of contradictions... The sequence follows his alter egos through three phases of transvestism, from frumpy to flirty and fetishistic... In the first piece, Chakravarthi seems to have raided a charity shop in a bid to look like his mum... In the final sequence, Chakravarthi slips into a slinky corset and... we see him confidently seducing inebriated men, having progressed from housewife to hooker in three easy stages." – Alfred Hickling | |||
| Great Expectations (Live performance with video) | 2002 |
| Chakravarthi sitting with his back to the audience in front of a video projection also showing the back of his head. | ||
| Olympia (Video installation) | 2003 |
| "Chakravarthi is seen as 'Olympia', a sexually ambiguous figure, dark, transfixed and oblivious to his/her white, male servant. The tension between the two characters is filled with ambiguity too, suggesting emotions of, love, hate, lust and obsession." – Cornerhouse, Manchester | ||
| To the Man in my Dreams (Installation and live performance) |
| A collaborative project with members of SW5, a London advice and information service for male, female and transgender sex workers (now known as SWISH). A collection of letters between someone who calls himself 'father' and 'George'. | |||
| Masking (Film) | 2009 Live Art Development Agency | Short film produced to celebrate LADA's tenth anniversary."′Masking′ is an investigation of the visual creation and identification of archetypal and racially motivated images in pornography... This short film of 'The Blonde' and 'The Black Diva' is a study of some of the reoccurring stereotypes in pornography." – LADA[38] | |||
| I Feel Love! (Durational live performance) | 2009 SPILL Festival of Performance |
| An outdoor performance lasting all day that examines ways in which the body is traditionally portrayed in public sculpture, memorials and popular culture. | ||
| Ode to a Dark Star (Video installation) |
| Chakravarthi in costume as both Shakespeare and the 3rd Earl of Southampton in a looped video displayed in a frame, giving the impression of a painting with some motion. The Cobbe portrait of Shakespeare was shown for the first time in the same exhibition (Shakespeare Found: a Life Portrait). There is also a Cobbe portrait of Southampton. | |||
| George Chakravarthi UnSeen (DVD) | 2009 Live Art Development Agency | A slide-show of early, photographic self-portraits by Chakravarthi. The photographs show him experimenting with his identity; they represent the earliest documentation of the experiences which inform much of his current work. The soundtrack is a conversation between Chakravarthi and Andrew Mitchelson in which Chakravarthi talks about his childhood experiences in India and London, and about feeling an outsider as far as both cultures are concerned. | |||
| Negrophilia (Live performance) | 2010 Duckie |
| Negrophilia is inspired by the Parisian avant-garde culture of the 1920s and its fascination with Africanism (Negrophilia), Hollywood cinema's negative portrayals of Africa and Africans in the same era and the performer Josephine Baker. Chakravarthi reveals himself dressed, as Baker famously did, in a banana skirt and pearls."Good art makes you see the world differently – whether it's George Chakravarthi shimmying in drag from inside a gorilla suit at ALAG, or Turner's spectacular landscapes hanging in the Tate." – Mary Paterson ″George Chakravarthi's dance performance in which he transforms from an ape to a chorus girl, skewering the histories of racism, evolution and exhibitionism in one long, seductive move″ – Mary Paterson[58] | ||
| Thirteen (Photographic – comprises 13 separate images) | Self-portraits of Chakravarthi in costume as thirteen Shakespeare characters (male and female) who committed suicide. Each image is layered with textures including cobwebs, mould, stone, water and clouds. Backlit transparencies in light boxes, characters about life-size.[78] [79] "Suicide might be the theme but it is difficult not to feel uplifted by the beauty of these images." – David Whetstone | ||||
| Miss UK (an archive) (Live performance in three parts) | 2011 Duckie |
| A dance floor posing piece that celebrates the glamour and absurdity of beauty contests in the UK from the 1960s to the 90s (such as Miss United Kingdom). | ||
| Andhaka (Live performance) | 2013 Live Art Development Agency | A one-to-one durational performance. Chakravarthi is present in darkness and is finally revealed in a flood of light as Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction and creation.[84] "reaction[s] to the performance came in extremes... most... emotional, often tearful, some tapped into their own fears and... felt threatened... Both reactions were... integral to the work." – George Chakravarthi | |||
| Barflies (Photographic) | 2014 | Edition of fifteen, signed sets of three prints based on the 2002 video installation Barflies (see above). Produced for the Live Art Development Agency's 15th Anniversary Limited Editions series.[85] | |||
| The Ambidextrous Universe (Photographic) | 2015 |
| Six self-portraits, which are the first pieces of work emerging from Chakravarthi's current and ongoing research known as The Ambidextrous Universe.[86] The images explore symmetry and emphasise the fractal construction of objects in nature and religious architecture.[87] [88] | ||
| Border Force - I Did ′India′ (Performance installation) | 2015 Duckie |
| Performance installation as part of a Duckie 'geo-political-immersive-disko' confronting xenophobia and promoting freedom of movement.[92] [93] "UK nationals have freedom of movement to 174 countries and territories (89% of the countries of the world), ranking the British passport 1st (tied with Finnish, German, Swedish and the US). By comparison, having an Afghanistan passport gives you free access to just 28... | ||
| Let Them Eat Cake (Performance installation) | 2016 Duckie |
| Performance installation as part of Duckie's 'Lady Malcolm's Servants' Ball'. Chakravarthi, as Marie Antoinette, hand feeds slices of a cake decorated with a map of the British Empire to members of the audience - referencing feasts and famines across the British Empire. | ||
| Negrophilia (Film screening) | 2016 | ||||
| Mata Bahucharaji (Goddess of Eunuchs) (Painting) | 2016 |
| |||
| An Indian in a Box (Performance installation) | 2021 Duckie |
| Live, durational performance installation as part of Duckie's 'Princess: The Promenade Performance', inspired by the queer history of Georgian London. Chakravarthi presents issues of enslavement, voyeurism, fetishisation 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 1990s in some countries across Europe. Captured and encased in a glass cabinet, Chakravarthi, in Georgian gentleman's attire, presents himself as a living object of curiosity and an exoticised creature. The performance in Slovenia was part of the 'International Festival of Contemporary Arts – City of Women', Chakravarthi was dressed in Slovene national costume. | ||
| AUM (Site-specific, multi-media project - video, sound and photography) | 2022 Nomad Projects | New body of work exploring Indian spiritual and tribal practices instigated while being the artist in residence at Phytology throughout 2022. See the image below of the billboard launching the work. | |||
| The Ascension of the Bearded Lady (Performance installation) | 2023 Duckie |
| Live, durational performance installation as part of the 'Duckie Summer Fete'. | ||
| Self-Portrait As An Unknown Devadasi(Photograph) | 2023 | Part of the exhibition ‘Oor’ and produced by The Queer Tamil Collective |
On 22 October 2024 at the Queer Heritage and Collections Network Symposium 2024, held at Kensington Palace, the keynote event was "In conversation with George Chakravarthi - discussion facilitated by Richard Sandell".[112]
A number of common themes are apparent in Chakravarthi’s work including:
Chakravarthi is married and lives in London and Leicestershire. He and his husband have been together since January 1994, they were legally married at Chelsea Old Town Hall, King's Road, London in May 2006 (their civil partnership having later been converted into marriage).[117]