Art practice
Ananya Ganesh (b. 1997) is an improviser from Madras based in North America. Her idiosyncratically simultaneous improvisation of the voice and piano lies between the unrealizable and what could be. Playing with the limits of the embodied ear, their work unfurls as expressions of indeterminacy, spontaneity, and the joys of dissonance and (in)access. Live performances, improvised from and with disregard for “maps” created for each venue, consist of modular short-form vignettes and long-form pieces. Ganesh sculpts these open forms through the explorations of dynamics, texture, density, registral color, imbricated lines, and sparseness. Her mentors and collaborators include John McDonald, Jacob Hiser, Domenic Hutchins (Mme Sand), Alex Fournier, Raphael Roter (Unbleak Trio), Amber Wolfe Rounds and others. Her debut EP, precis-loving, was re-released on Worried Songs in 2023.
Research & Teaching
Ganesh works at the intersection of political economy, philosophy, and aesthetics. Her research traces how economic models function not only as analytic tools but as aesthetic forms that encode vibrant contradictions. Current projects focus on the use of Robinson Crusoe in economic modeling, particularly the Crusoe Economy diagram as a site where questions of subjecthood and legibility are unwittingly staged. More broadly, she engages the history of economic thought to understand how economics disavows the conditions of its own possibility.
The homologies between her art practice and study lie in confronting (self)contradiction and immanence. Out in the so-called real world, her organizing support has helped found and/or operationalize arts collectives. The hope is to attend to the state of the world through these interconnected practices and learn to collectively reconstruct our self-understanding as protean creators.
