ART-PRESENTATION: Rina Banerjee-Make Me a Summary of the World
Rina Banerjee’s work is made from materials sourced throughout the world. She is a voracious gatherer of objects, in a single sculpture one can find African tribal jewelry, colorful feathers, light bulbs, Murano glass, and South Asian antiques in conflict and conversation with one another. Her approach to assemblage and installation represents a new version of hunting and gathering facilitated by the Internet, which enables materials to be efficiently sourced and delivered from all over the globe. While the visual culture that she experienced as a child in India greatly influences her aesthetic, her immigration to the United Kingdom and her love of the diverse culture of her current home, New York City, form the core of her practice.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: PAFA Archive
Rina Banerjee emergence as an artist in the late 1990s parallels the expansion of the global art world and the Internet. Institutions and galleries began to give more consideration to under-represented artists and the ideas of these artists began to shape the agenda of the art world. Art fairs and biennials proliferated in Asia (Banerjee found great success in the emerging contemporary Asian art market, for example) and the contemporary art world began to feel borderless. Rina Banerje’s exhibition “Make Me a Summary of the World”, at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), is the first in-depth examination into her work and brings together examples of Banerjee’s spanning 20 years of work. The exhibition presents a singular opportunity to consider the cross- temporal connections and overlapping themes that unite her sprawling installations, exquisitely crafted sculptures, and ethereal paintings. The exhibition is modeled on Banerjee’s diffuse, non- linear approach to art making and explore the overlapping themes in her career. Instead of a chronological progression, this format acts as a “mind map” of the artist’s work, with the large- scale installations serving as nodes from which emanates a network of thematically related paintings and sculptures. “Viola, from New Orleans- ah” (2017) is a 21st Century Winged Victory of Samothrace after the Hellenistic version from the 2nd century BCE. Banerjee’s goddess appears to have just landed triumphantly on a bed of oyster shells, wings still fluttering, with a diaphanous parachute trailing behind to soften her descent. She carries glass beads, silks and shawls, a toy Ferris wheel, glass horns, and sundry other objects on her body. There is weight to her wings and strength in her stance. She is oddly familiar, yet conspicuously foreign; a vision from the future with vestiges from the ancient world; paradoxically rooted though itinerant. In this work, all of the major themes that Banerjee focuses on in her work come together—the lasting effects of colonialism and its relationship to globalization; immigration and identity; gender and sexuality; and the global causes and impacts of climate change. Over the past twenty years, Banerjee has produced hundreds of drawings (inks, acrylics, watercolors, and various mixed media on paper and panel) which have received limited attention in her critical reception. The artist herself tends to speak of her practice in terms of objects, points of entry into a tangled skein of commerce and identity, all the while continuing to prolifically paint and draw on paper and wood panel. It is perhaps a dubious effort to isolate one form of production within an artistic oeuvre built on interwoven material histories and themes of hybridity and interconnectedness. But Banerjee works in wholes. She explores entire objects, entrenched material lineages, histories of color, the entirety of the colonial world, India, New York, biology—each a universe pulled whole into Banerjee’s orbit. This essay endeavors to extract one part of her oeuvre, the drawings, and examine it as a porous, disjointed, and circuitous synecdoche for her larger practice. Unpacking such densely layered and referential work is imprecise at best—rather like disentangling an impossible knot—but it is through this effort to isolate that the entrenched connectivity of Banerjee’s world emerges. The first ten years of Banerjee’s life were spent in migration. Her family left her birthplace of Calcutta, India, for London in 1967 and, by 1970, had moved to Queens, New York. Aside from a five- year period when the family lived in Philadelphia, Banerjee grew up in the syncretistic space of New York City. Though she lived for only three years in South Asia, the region of her birth would come to define how she is positioned as an artist and as a United States citizen. While the culture of India certainly came to influence her work, the textiles, colors, and histories from her birth country were delivered through the perspectives and adherence to tradition of her parents. Objects took on added meaning as they were moved to a new country and became filtered through the experiences of first- generation immigrants. In the footsteps of her father, Banerjee studied polymer engineering at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Her sensitivity toward uncommon sculpture, making objects and her non- hierarchical approach to materials evolved through her studies of plastics. Though she took a job at Penn State University as a research engineer, Banerjee found herself making paintings and drawings in her free time, a pastime that led to her earning an MFA from Yale School of Art in 1995.
Info: Curators: Jodi Throckmorton and Lauren Schell Dickens, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), 118-128 North Broad Street, Philadelphia, Duration: 27/10/18-31/3/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-17:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-17:00, www.pafa.org
Center: Rina Banerjee, Friendly Fire signal to me this limb lean without width long as sudden snake made phantom to eye disarm him of his tired heel and spectrum of distaste…, 2015, steel structure, textiles, beads, feathers, thread, bulbs, 46 x 48 x 35 in. Private Collection-Rydal, Pennsylvania © Rina Banerjee, Image courtesy of Hosfelt Gallery-San Francisco
Right: Rina Banerjee, Golden Opportunity, 2006, mixed media on paper, 30 x 22 in. Private Collection, Courtesy Galleria dello Scudo-Verona, Italy © Rina Banerjee, Image courtesy of Rina Banerjee Archives
Center: Rina Banerjee, Make me a summary of the world! She was his guide and had traveled on camel, rhino, elephant and kangaroo, dedicated to dried plants, glass houses—for medical study, vegetable sexuality, self-pollination, fertilization her reach pierced the woods country by country, 2014, wood rhino, Chinese umbrellas, sea sponges, linen, beads, pewter soldier, grape vines, glass chandelier drops, acrylic horns, wire, nylon and bead flower, 7 x 4 ft. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/ Brussels, © Rina Banerjee, Image courtesy of Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels
Right: Rina Banerjee, Take me, take me, take me…to the Palace of love, 2003, plastic, antique Anglo-Indian Bombay dark wood chair, steel and copper framework, floral picks, foam balls, cowrie shells, quilting pins, red-colored moss, antique stone globe, glass, synthetic fabric, shells, fake birds, 226 x 161 x 161 in. Courtesy of artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels © Rina Banerjee, Image courtesy of Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia/Barbara Katus. Installation View: Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Center: Rina Banerjee, Viola, from New Orleans-ah, an African Woman, was the 19th century’s rescue worker, a global business goods raker, combed, tilled the land of Commerce, giving America a certain extra extra excess culture, to cultivate it, making home for aliens not registered, made business of the finer, finer, had occupations, darning thread not leisure with reason and with luster, in “peek a boo” racial disguises preoccupied in circulating commerce, entertaining white folks, pulling and punching holes in barriers, place that where was once barren, without them, white banks made of mustard and made friendly folks feel home, welcomed and married immigrants from far noted how they been also starved, fled from servitude and colonial dangers, ships like dungeons, pushing coal in termite wholes, churning fire, but always learning, folding, washing, welcomed as aliens. She wandering, hosting, raising children connected to new mobilities and most unusual these movements in Treme’, New Orleans was a incubating, enmeshed embedded in this silken cocoon when she land, she’s came to be parachute mender, landed those black immigrant peddlers from Hoogali network of new comers, 2017, Murano glass horns, Indian rakes, seed beads, steel, Yoruba African mask, oyster shells, cowrie shells, Charlotte dolls, polyester horse hair trim, Korean silks, Indian silks, vintage Kashmir shawls, French wire Ferris wheel, Congolese elbow bangles, colonial mirror sconces, Japanese seed glass beads, sequins, threads, dimensions variable. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Museum Purchase, 2017.53 © Rina Banerjee, Image courtesy of Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia/Barbara Katus. Installation View: Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Right: Rina Banerjee, Make me a summary of the world! She was his guide and had traveled on camel, rhino, elephant and kangaroo, dedicated to dried plants, glass houses—for medical study, vegetable sexuality, self-pollination, fertilization her reach pierced the woods country by country, 2014, wood rhino, Chinese umbrellas, sea sponges, linen, beads, pewter soldier, grape vines, glass chandelier drops, acrylic horns, wire, nylon and bead flower, 7 x 4 ft. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/ Brussels, © Rina Banerjee, Image courtesy of Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels
