Feature by Vivian Wang
Photos by Harper Rosenberg
Born and raised in California, Ankita Chatterjee (BC’27) studies mathematics and religion at Barnard College. Through her “readymade” conceptual art pieces, she takes advantage of the denotative and connotative implications of everyday objects, bringing her fascination with deciphering the world into the physical realm.
“With traditional art, it's all about the aesthetic, and how much physical labor is used. Conceptual art taps into the raw ideas and the subconscious.”
Ankita’s Duchampian artworks are filled with eerie juxtapositions and hauntingly beautiful symbolism, often ambiguous and sometimes even mischievous. Her creations are built with a manifesto to shock and disrupt their audience. In these carefully manipulated readymades, Ankita is able to curate our emotions and excavate the deeper meaning of objects, both familiar and unfamiliar. Having just taken a course in 20th-century art, I was eager to connect Ankita’s artwork to the likes of Meret Oppenheim or Claes Oldenburd, artists with similar interests in disturbing the senses and incurring reaction, but Ankita operates independently from these larger movements. She explained, “I did not spend my life consuming things. I spent my life creating things.” Her source of inspiration comes from the quotidian objects themselves rather than other artists.
Studying math and religion satisfies Ankita’s underlying desire to understand our world. She described herself to me as an ideological individual, preferring argument and logic. The former helps organize patterns and categorize certain concepts while the latter tackles the inexplicable feelings and phenomena that can’t be categorized through proofs and formulae.
Ankita was born with an itch to create. As early as she can remember, she was scribbling on walls with crayons, which eventually led her to an art studio where she was trained in traditional media, primarily oil painting. There, she found solace and validation in creation; however, switching art studios in high school became the pivotal push she needed towards introspective creativity. Her new teacher seemed to understand her on a deeper level, encouraging her to dissect life rather than accept it at face value. Through this, she found herself resonating with the mundane objects that surround us, uncovering meaning in the everyday.
“Every object I look at serves more than just its functionality. I think we have a lot of really strange things. Think about the underground irrigation system. Think about cow’s milk. These things are so odd. A lot of my art and a lot of my thought process has just been trying to understand the world and its complexity and how humanity has built everything that we see around us. Things like art, music, creation, and ideas really testify to that strange capacity that humans have that other animals don’t, which I think is really amazing.”
Ankita described her transition from traditional to unconventional media as a painful process, one inseparable from her evolving philosophical perspective. The shift from the familiar structure of traditional techniques forced her to confront uncertainty and redefine her creative identity. “Being able to use any object to create your art and being able to do anything, give you a certain freedom– but that freedom also means, how do you tell whether it's good art or bad?” she explained. Still, in utilizing her visual rhetoric, she was ultimately able to discover a more authentic mode of expression that allowed her to engage more thoroughly with ideas, emotions, and issues in the world around her.
Grandmother’s Afternoon Tea
Many of her artworks are rooted in a personal experience that evolves into broader human themes. A fan favorite, Grandmother’s Afternoon Tea is a spectral recomposition of Ankita’s grandmother. Using a lacquer process, she meticulously transferred images of her grandmother onto fresh teabags, arranging them in slices within a glass cylinder. The inspiration stemmed from Ankita’s childhood, spent listening to her grandmother’s stories about her life as a professor in England– her extravagant lifestyle, defining experiences, and proudest achievements. Over time, Ankita came to associate teabags, the quintessential British object, with her grandmother. This connection led her to explore the intriguing idea that people, their essence and their narratives, can be represented– or even distilled– into singular objects, whether as ordinary as a tea bag or as grand as an award.
Defending the Womb / Fetal Chaos
Her series Defending the Womb / Fetal Chaos, similarly comes from a childhood experience of fearing the mysterious insides of empty shells. What began as an irrational childhood anxiety became a powerful metaphor for how society perceives confident women. The unsettling tension between beauty and fear became central to this piece, reflecting the ways in which strength, particularly in women, is often misunderstood or even vilified. “When a woman is strong, she’s regarded as scary,” Ankita explained. “There’s a long history of men being afraid of strong women who know how to protect themselves.” She explores this idea through an elegant shell lined with a sharp set of teeth. This juxtaposition embodies a dichotomy in femininity: delicate yet fierce, nurturing yet defensive. The addition of teeth transforms a shell from a passive object into one with agency.
Sweet Phobia
Fear and juxtaposition seem to weave through her work as recurring themes. In Sweet Phobia, she explores the hustle culture that has permeated modern life, drawing inspiration from her own fear of riding bikes. It’s not a matter of ability—unlike me, she can ride—but rather the anxiety of having to stop. The thought of pausing, even briefly, fills her with anxiety– how could she ever mount quickly enough to merge back into the relentless flow of traffic? The bicycle, being an intrinsically kinetic object, becomes an emblem of momentum. The bike’s brake wire in Sweet Phobia is broken and filled with candy, highlighting the absurdity of constant productivity. Through this playful yet pointed allegory, Ankita critiques the toxic notion that taking a break means losing all momentum, revealing the irony of a system that glorifies burnout over balance– something Columbia students could take note of.
While Ankita’s personal fears inspire various sculptures, others seek to create fear in the viewer. Works like Filtered Communication are deliberately designed to trigger a reaction of unease. Affixing colorful insulation wires to a gas mask, Ankita uses this ominous piece to interrogate the enigma of communication, a concept she considers to be fundamentally flawed in our society. This investigation extends across multiple artworks, including Dialogue, where she further dissects the complexities of human interaction. In a rather suffocating composition, Filtered Communication examines not only the barriers to understanding but also the distortions that occur when different perspectives, ideals, and intentions collide. It grapples with the inherent loss embedded in language– how meaning is diluted through syllables, sounds, and imperfect translation, leaving behind fragments of what was intended to be understood.
A lot of the works that caught my eye reflect a self-awareness of the innate triviality of this genre of art. With limitless possibilities at her disposal, the challenge often lies in determining which objects have the merit to become art pieces, but Ankita has learned to trust her intuition. She leans into the fact that much of conceptual art lacks technique and is rather inconsequential.
There’s a certain humor in watching the audience try to determine a deeper meaning in these pieces that are simply meant to be visually intriguing, and, for lack of a better word, cool. I, unfortunately, fell victim to this trap. Before even conducting our interview, I had already drafted up sentences in my notes app discussing the relational composition of Murmurings, and by the time we sat down, I was practically jumping out of my seat to know what narrative filled these paper cups– only to find out there wasn’t one. We laughed together at my overeager enthusiasm. “This is like the banana on the wall,” she remarked, “ I included this just to say that I’m owning up to the fact that I make art that’s also really shit. It was initially about communication and data privacy, but really… there’s nothing going on.”
Sweet Illumination
My favorite piece by Ankita, Sweet Illumination, began as one of those fun experiments but became something far more profound. There was a broken light fixture in her art studio, long forgotten, and she wanted to repurpose it in an unconventional way by filling it with gummy bears. She was drawn to the playful, almost absurd contrast of synthetic candy and industrial design, expecting only a visually striking result. But then, something unexpected happened. After years of dormancy, the fixture flickered back to life, casting a warm, stained-glass glow. The piece is meant to convey the fleeting euphoria of eating, while also critiquing the addictive mechanisms engineered into food products that encourage overconsumption and contribute to widespread obesity. But for me, Sweet Illumination transcends its intended message. It’s a beautiful reflection of chance, a quiet moment of serendipity where something broken reignites, against all odds.
There's an aspect of ephemerality in Ankita’s pieces that enhances their impact. She doesn’t subscribe to the idea of preserving her sculptures, rather, once a piece is formulated and documented, it’s disassembled. For her, the essence of the artwork is not in its physical longevity but in the process of its creation and the ideas it leaves behind. By removing the pressure of preservation, she finds herself more free to experiment.
She put it this way:
“I take them apart because part of my maturing has been realizing that good art doesn't have to be something profound. It just has to represent some element of human life or something that I found particularly beautiful. There's this element of success and failure, which I don't believe is how art should be approached. It's just junk without the context of being art. When you add the context that this is an art piece, which I think the photography does and the narrative does, then it becomes meaningful.”
Though her pieces only exist in the physical world for a brief period of time, the emotions, ideas, and reflections they evoke linger in the minds of viewers, becoming fleeting testimonies to the unnoticed.
Coming to college, Ankita has shifted more of her creative energy towards poetry and essay writing, yet sculptural media remains a constant in her daily life. “After making art like this, I really started seeing things in a schizophrenic way. I see things that aren’t there,” she joked, demonstrating with the couch next to us.
“My life dream is to wander off into the woods, totally disconnect from society, build my own farm, live self-sustaining, and write essays about religious philosophy.”