Rina Banerjee

“In Western art, to explore something you cannot identify with is a kind of dishonesty, because authenticity is a compass . . . [but] authenticity does not exist for the diaspora.” —Rina Banerjee  

Rina Banerjee is a voracious gatherer of objects. In a single sculpture one can find African tribal jewelry, colorful feathers, lightbulbs, Murano glass, and South Asian antiques, joined together in conflict and conversation. 

she lived in India as a child, immigrated with her family to London, and has made New York City her home for many years. Calling upon a multiplicity of identities, her work rejects the idea that identity is based exclusively on one’s culture of origin or gender. 

Through these assemblages, Banerjee makes visible the transnational movement of people and objects. This approach and aesthetic is greatly influenced by her own global trajectory:

Rather it frames identity as a process of self-identification—a dance of constant negotiation that draws attention to the fragmentation and dispersal of cultures throughout the world. Beautiful and uncomfortable, alluring and repulsive, 

Banerjee’s work insists on being read in all of its cultural and political complexity.

Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World brings together examples of the artist’s extraordinary work spanning the past twenty years, offering a singular opportunity to consider the myriad connections among her sprawling installations, exquisitely crafted sculptures, 

and ethereal paintings. Rather than progressing chronologically, the exhibition is modeled on Banerjee’s own diffuse, non-linear approach. Within its layout, large installations serve as focal points for exploring overlapping themes of colonialism and globalism; immigration and identity; gender and sexuality; and climate change and the natural world. 

Within its layout, large installations serve as focal points for exploring overlapping themes of colonialism and globalism; immigration and identity; gender and sexuality; and climate change and the natural world. At a time of increasingly factious politics and instability, Banerjee’s reflections on the splintered experience of immigration and the tangled inequities of our globally connected world feel ever more prescient and vital.

In A World Lost (2013), Banerjee models the major river systems of Asia to craft a powerful message on the inequalities inherent to the global movement of people and goods and the impact of such exchanges on the natural world. Banerjee first conceived of the artwork 

Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World is co-organized by the San José Museum of Art (SJMA) and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). 

on a trip with her mother to Bangladesh, where her family was selling some of their property. While visiting the family who had been living on their land, Banerjee witnessed two girls collecting and purifying water for the day’s activities—

—one was digging to reach the water below the earth, while the other was straining water through cloth. Banerjee was struck by the amount of work required to offer a guest a glass of water and, more importantly, to ensure the family’s basic survival. 

The plastic cups in A World Lost allude to this personal experience of environmental change. The complexity of the situation is amplified by the fact that the cups themselves play a part in our environment’s degradation, examples of the plastic detritus filling our oceans and rivers.

Recognizing humans’ central role in our rapidly changing ecosystem, Banerjee creates a chimerical world that suggests an alternative vision for people’s interactions and relationships with their environments.

With its postcolonial title and intertwining of a Victorian-era chair with Chinese electric altar lamps, the work connects the atrocities of colonialism to our trafficked global present. A throne of sorts, The promise of self rule sits high, a powerful symbol of a shifting hierarchy. However, it is precariously hung, suggesting that self-rule is always a tenuous state. The end of one empire is often the beginning of another.

Banerjee’s titles, often more than fifty words long and filled with idiosyncratic spellings, represent her rebellion against the worldwide dominance of the English language. They are, according to her, “an attempt to massage [the English language] to speak for  a vast number  people who use it sparingly, awkwardly, creatively under the pressures of globalization, colonization, and commercialization of English culture.” Her stringing together of words, another form of assemblage, and her poetically dizzying titles, more evocative than informative, provide an intentionally slippery context for her work.

Banerjee’s work frames identity as an ongoing process of negotiation rather than a fixed category determined by one’s culture of origin or gender. In works such as her 1999 series An Uncertain Bondage is Required When Threatening Transmission, she calls upon a multiplicity of identities to highlight the fragmentation and dispersal of cultures throughout the world. The body of work likens migration to the spreading of disease—a dark metaphor for the treatment of immigrants and refugees throughout the world. 

For SJMA’s exhibition, she has created a new, related installation, titled In breathless confinement. A medical experiment gone awry, the work calls out the prevailing fear of people from other cultures in the United States—a powerful statement  when the series began and even more urgent today. The contaminated “Other” will not be contained.

For Banerjee the female body is a site of transmission where cultural and social discourses intersect. Dress and decoration are at the root of the artist’s creations: the elegantly adorned figure in Beauty was not in the East (2013) wears a  wears a faux-snakeskin skirt, while many of her sculptures incorporate luscious fabrics sourced from her Garment District neighborhood, in New York City. Banerjee remarks that “ideas of the ‘foreign’ and the feminine have become joined in ‘policing’ one another

as well as being the subject of suspicion.” Her work brings awareness to the gendered biases associated with particular materials or colors. For example, why are pink feathers commonly considered feminine while a rope is typically perceived as masculine? Arguing against the binaries of male/female and Western/Eastern, Banerjee seeks a concept of gender that transcends the lens of Western society to take part in a complicated web of global and local meanings.

While unabashedly celebrating sexuality, Banerjee’s work also purposefully provokes anxiety and revulsion. With breath taking consumption (2008) is seductively tactile—one is tempted to touch the silky feathers—yet the haunting creature at the center of the jute bed simultaneously threatens. Binding desire and danger in her work, Banerjee explores the ways that patriarchal structures use violence to deny sexual agency and femininity to women throughout the world. 

Copiously adorned with cowries, The world as burnt fruit (2009) is part creation myth, part ominous warning. It features a gharial, a crocodile native to northern India and considered critically endangered, that destroys the world it has created. The fighting,  greed, and environmental degradation have become too much; the sweetness of the world is scorched beyond remedy. 

The gharial’s consumption speaks of both appetite and the insatiable desire to acquire and conquer that defined the colonial era and assumes new forms in our globalized consumer society.

Banerjee’s plastic interpretation of India’s Taj Mahal is an ode to travel and fantasy. Built in the early seventeenth century by Mughal emperor Shah Jahan as a mausoleum for his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal, the white marble structure is an icon of  Indo-Islamic architecture. Artisans and workers from all over the Mughal Empire, as well as Central Asia and Iran, were brought to Agra to build it—a feat of cultural hybridity that attracted Banerjee to the subject.

The artist is also interested in the ways that the Taj Mahal, widely considered a monument to romantic love, represents the complicated history between marriage, power, and money. For Banerjee, “the legendary marriages of royalty, as well as celebrities, have, in history, secured peace and created markets of exchange. Weddings themselves have been the center of this type of business, an industry of exchanges, compromise, and diplomacy. When these changes are made what’s also being changed is culture.

Viola, from New Orleans-ah carries beads, silks and shawls, a toy Ferris wheel, horns, and other sundry objects. There is weight to her wings and strength in her stance. In this work, made for the 2017 Prospect Triennial in New Orleans, Banerjee is responding to the real-life story of Viola Ida Lewis, an African American woman from New Orleans who, in 1906, married Joseph Abdin, a South Asian immigrant. Their marriage represents the African American community’s acceptance of Bengali immigrants, 

many of whom came to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and found work in the country’s car and steel factories. Bengali families often went on to run import businesses, and Bengali women played key roles in bringing silks and embroidered fabrics, like those assembled here, to New Orleans.

Viola, from New Orleans-ah carries beads, silks and shawls, a toy Ferris wheel, horns, and other sundry objects. There is weight to her wings and strength in her stance. In this work, made for the 2017 Prospect Triennial in New Orleans, Banerjee is responding to the real-life story of Viola Ida Lewis, an African American woman from New Orleans who, in 1906, married Joseph Abdin, a South Asian immigrant. Their marriage represents the African American community’s acceptance of Bengali immigrants, 

many of whom came to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and found work in the country’s car and steel factories. Bengali families often went on to run import businesses, and Bengali women played key roles in bringing silks and embroidered fabrics, like those assembled here, to New Orleans.