We are exited to announce Ruth Patir’s participation in the third edition of Chennai Photo Biennale, “Maps of Disquiet”, with her 3D documentary “Mary Fuck Kill” (2019).

Titled Maps of Disquiet, the Biennale will reflect on the exigencies of our times: resisting majoritarian impositions, ecological collapse, and technological dystopias by reclaiming pluralities of thought, voices, and art, and building new networks of solidarity and care.

The site of the ‘Great Trigonometrical Survey’ of 1802, the first colonial attempt to measure and map the subcontinent, Chennai today is an arena of contested visions of a common future that resonates beyond. Anchoring itself in Chennai, the biennale will delve into the invisible realms of power and knowledge that shape our global present while simultaneously proposing the creation of resistant cartographies. It asks, whose resources? Whose rivers? Whose interests? Whose voices? Whose images?

The biennale brings together artists and practices that explore the representation of labour, urban imaginaries, the commons, economic and migratory flows, archaeology and mining, and what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, describing growing hostility towards minorities across the world, refers to as a ‘fear of small numbers’.

Marry Fuck Kill” is a cross generational 3D documentary that reimagines fertility goddesses from ancient times as real-life women, by animating them as digital moving sculptural bodies. The film deals with the intricacies of the historical representation of the female form, and the passive yet willful clichés and misunderstandings that surround them.

Dates: Dec 9 – Feb 6, 2022 (in virtual and physical forms)

Image: still from “Marry Fuck Kill”, 2019, 3D animation video