All Images by Karen Knorr. A PLACE LIKE AMRAVATI. UDAIPUR CITY PALACE.

Karen Knorr has built a career out of examining our most opulent places: châteax, English gentlemen’s clubs, grand museums, and her own lavish childhood home. Knorr details the beauty of the finest architecture and ornament, but luxuriating in the grandeur isn’t the point. Knorr fills her rooms with occupants that belie the established respectability and dominance of such seats of power. Tweed-clad men representing the English landed gentry stand idle on their rolling grounds, at a loss amidst so much wilderness. A naked woman lounges on a museum floor, daring tourists to find her naked body obscene among its million painted counterparts. Lately, Knorr has been using animals as the unlikely inhabitants of castles and academies. Using a time-consuming digital process she calls “photoweaving,” Knorr slips giraffes and leopards into the elite’s most carefully molded, supposedly controlled interiors, rendering centuries-old monuments to human hierarchy instantly ephemeral. Though her work was initially grounded in her European roots, she carries her concerns overseas in her latest series, India Song. Knorr spoke with us from outside of Hampi, in southwest India.

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