Roshan Ganu: रातराणी: The Night Blooming Jasmine

Banner image: रातराणी: The Night Blooming Jasmine, installation detail. Photo courtesy of the artist.

 

The South Asian Gallery at the Minneapolis Institute of Art hosts a rotating selection from its permanent collection. For me, they are familiar sculptures and paintings often found in temples, shrines, or domestic altars. Despite no close involvement with traditions and contemporary practices of Hinduism, the divine sculptures and their stories were a prominent part of my childhood. However, even a cultural bond with the artworks could not diminish their aura of displacement in such a context. The true purpose of the artworks was transferred to historical didacticism dependent on labels. Unlike at home, no sculpture shined with gold offerings, smelled like turmeric, or dripped with cow milk. The true essence of the artworks in the South Asian Gallery of course cannot be activated in a museum. 

Across the hallway from these troubled galleries is the US Bank Gallery, home of the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program (MAEP), which for 50 years has supported artists living in the state. During my visit, India-born, Minneapolis-based artist Roshan Ganu’s first United States institutional exhibition —  रातराणी: The Night Blooming Jasmine — was being held. This was my first time both seeing an MAEP exhibition and experiencing Ganu’s work. I was intrigued. While its close proximity to the South Asian Gallery is a coincidence in this case, I couldn’t help but put them in relation and wonder if such a contemporary exhibition can do the work to activate and reflect life and culture in a way encyclopedic collections cannot.

Walking into the first of two large galleries, an inviting darkness immediately surrounded me, then a beautiful fluorescent green color caught my eye: the title रातराणी translates from Marathi language into English as “the night queen” — a personification of the unique jasmine flower that comes out to bloom only at night. I appreciated how Ganu, who is multilingual, incorporated her mother tongue in the title and throughout the exhibition’s artwork titles and extended labels. Ganu is from Goa, a state known for its nightlife that must be visited by Indians at least once in a lifetime. The subject of the night with its unique qualities is perceived through the lens of the artist’s experience as a woman, a common theme Ganu has been exploring in her work. 

 

Top: रातराणी: The Night Blooming Jasmine, installation detail. Photo courtesy of the artist. Bottom: नरकासुराची रात्र : The Night Of The Narkasur (detail), 2024. Photo by Russ White.

 

As Ganu explains, dominant society pins the night as a woman’s worst enemy, a time that should be feared and not reckoned with. So, with the words and works in the first gallery instead connecting night to liberation, I became curious. In her acrylic and cut paper on drop cloth painting, नरकासुराची रात्र: The Night Of The Narkasur and her moving-image collage स्वप्न प्रतिमा: Dreamscapes, liberation is surprisingly connected to Naraka Chaturdasi — the second day of the annual Hindu festival of Diwali that celebrates the death of the demon Narkasur. In India, it may be only on the first night of Diwali — ironically, the annual Festival of Light — that women get to break the stereotypes and experience, even enjoy, the night without fear. Reflecting on the rare permissions Ganu had to experience, she states, “What I always found fascinating is that this demon was responsible for my liberation.” Ganu explores a paradoxical relationship between the demon king and a woman’s freedom to be outside after a so-called appropriate time. It felt like an open invitation for all audiences to think deeply about the kinds of realities women are expected to live in. 

The gallery’s high ceilings created an expansive space for Ganu’s liberated nightscapes. The walls were full of layered projections, animating tree branches that effortlessly danced to the wind. Glimpses of light would escape through the small pockets between the leaves and greet the gallery audiences. An intimately scaled ceramic sculpture of a neighbourhood wall covered in green leaves and jasmine flowers seemed like a miniature model of the abstracted environment surrounding it. Parallel to the sculpture, an acrylic painting that shares its title with the exhibition depicts yet another environment of rich foliage. The different renderings of the same scene both resembled my own balcony in India. The view from my balcony was never clear, always surrounded by huge trees and their dense leaves. The natural windows between leaves gave me glimpses of what was beyond. I remember peeking to see families, city lights, street dogs, hardworking watchmen, and flashes of the moon. This first of two galleries all felt familiar and comfortable; it felt like home. I was transported, as if I could smell the sweet jasmine from my neighbourhood.  

 

रातराणी: The Night Blooming Jasmine, installation detail. Photo courtesy of the artist.

 

In her artist talk with Virajita Singh at the Mia, Ganu articulated her choice to work across media, describing the “tunnel” between disciplines and media through which “the same entity” can be manifested in different worlds. Ganu’s multimedia approach seemed like puzzle pieces. In the act of putting them together, I had many conversations with and between the artworks. I believe this interactive experience was possible because Ganu treats her artworks as animate beings, rather than inanimate objects. 

Ganu’s deliberate embrace of nonlinear time can be felt, especially in the second, larger gallery.  In her words, “Time in here is not linear. There is no beginning, there is no end. Here is a circular idea of time.” The environment and looping, overlapping videos and sounds contribute to this, as do the extended labels that narrate stories from different times and places, from historical arcs of the ancient past to space exploration, to mundane or wondrous moments in the artist’s life. With comfortable cushions sprinkled across the floor, it was not that hard to be sucked into an ‘in-between’ realm. The space holds such a ‘नशा’, or nasha, meaning metaphorical intoxication, within which I often lost the ability to differentiate between nostalgia, fiction, and reality. 

 

रातराणी: The Night Blooming Jasmine, installation details. Photos courtesy of the artist.

 

Ganu choreographed a set of mirrors throughout the gallery as a reflective aspect of her single and multi-channel video works. I remember looking into the mirror while standing between a reflected fragment of Ganu — who performs in many of her works — dancing in the dark next to a painting of the demon kings. As the layered animations unfolded, the mirror created a multiperspectival look at myself within the exhibition; a realm where I could exist within the artworks. Another layer of meaning was added for me during her talk, as she drew attention to the dilemma of reality and fiction through the historical narrative of Diwali — a narrative often explored in the form of Indian epics such as Ramayana. My grandmother would tell me stories about Krishna, Rama, Draupati, and many other divine figures. I remember even reading the stories as comic books and watching them as TV shows. I know so much about them that it becomes rather hard to wonder, what if they are only fictional? The question of whether cultural narratives that fuel identities, belief systems, and festivals were or are real or fictional can never truly be answered. As a self-defined “multimedia narrative artist,” Ganu’s incorporation of this dilemma could play a role in how one experiences the mirrors. Is it not our ancestors, still with us, who have created such stories? Is it not us who continue to adapt them for our own times, for our own liberation?

 

Her Name : O (as pronounced in ‘Om’, a powerful abstract energy found in the origin of everything), 2024. Photo by Russ White.

 

The large painting and miniature ceramic entity of O — the artist’s alter ego — gave me the sense that I was floating in space, like her: a female figure, arms and legs extended, curious and buoyant without ground. O perfectly models the notion of the limitless self I had only met in my dreams. O passes forth a sense of reassurance that I hold the power to be whoever and whatever I strive to be — in light, in darkness, in reflections. 

A prominent motif in the second gallery and within Ganu’s larger practice is the moon with a face. Once again, I felt nostalgia, and later learned Ganu and I shared the experience of many bedtime stories and poems about चंदामामा (moon) from our grandmothers. Ganu personifies the moon with her face as an homage to two magicians who pioneered early cinema in their respective contexts: notably France’s George Méliès and India’s Dadasheb Phalke. Further, counting time and longing for home during the COVID-19 pandemic, Ganu turned to the shifting character of the moon according to her phases, who is always there save one darkened night per cycle.  

‘रातराणी:The Night Blooming Jasmine was an exhibition that evoked a lot of beautiful emotions in me. I walked away feeling calm and reassured. I couldn’t help but put Ganu’s work in dialogue with Mia’s historical collection, feeling it had the power to animate a uniquely personal presence within an otherwise territorially defined context sanitized by colonial protocols. The exhibition feels like evidence that encyclopedic museums need to invite and create spaces for artists and art that aid in reimagining pasts, presents, and futures of liberation. ◼︎ 

 

नरकासुराची रात्र : The Night Of The Narkasur (detail), 2024. Photo by Russ White.

Saina Kathi is a Curatorial Practices student at the University of Minnesota. Thanks to Lecturer Erin Robideaux Gleeson for her help in facilitating this review.

रातराणी: The Night Blooming Jasmine was on view in the US Bank Gallery at the Minneapolis Institute of Art from November 23, 2024 - February 23, 2025. To see more of Roshan Ganu's work, visit the artist's website or follow her on Instagram @blingalingthoughts.

To learn more about the MAEP program, visit Mia's website.