I’m very interested in the way we’ve made currency out of the world of objects. . . . I'm very interested in the way we think about our captivity and our identification with place, and how we can release ourselves.
Rina Banerjee, in “FAM in 60 Seconds: Rina Banerjee,” video made on the occasion of the exhibition Displacement: Symbols and Journeys, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park, FL, May 21–September 4, 2016, 1:22 minutes, available at youtube.com/watch?v=M9f2a8mrSDs.
Migration defines Rina Banerjee’s personal history. Born in 1963 in Kolkata, India, she moved with her parents to London at the age of five and then to Queens, New York, at age seven. Banerjee’s artwork is rooted in global movement and exchange between places and cultures. She initially studied polymer engineering at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland (the use of uncommon materials in her art practice would evolve from this early study of plastics), then took a job at Pennsylvania State University as a research engineer. Painting and drawing in her free time eventually led the artist to earn an MFA from Yale School of Art in 1995.1 Calling upon a multiplicity of identities, Banerjee’s work rejects the idea that identity is based exclusively on one’s gender or culture of origin, such as her Bengali-Indian or American roots. Rather, her work frames identity as a process of self-identification amid experiences of the dispersal and fragmentation of cultures.
Jodi Throckmorton, “Make Me a Summary of the World,” in Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; and San José, CA: San José Museum of Art, 2018), 20. ↩︎
Rina 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 Taj Mahal is an icon of Indo-Islamic architecture and widely considered a monument to romantic love. Banerjee’s bright pink Take me, take me, take me . . . to the Palace of love (2003), constructed with plastic Saran wrap, is an excessively sentimental and kitschy representation of India that revolves around a critique of the colonial gaze and the ongoing exoticism perpetrated by the tourist economy. Further, its color and ornamentation represent the complex ritual of marriage—both a marker of love and an exchange of value, like money and power.1 Banerjee used the color pink for its theatricality; as the artist described, the color “can make one feel vulnerable, luxurious, sentimental, nostalgic, tender, comical, sudden, centered, or even, idealistic.” But there’s a darker side too that speaks to “repression, oppression, submission, omission, struggle, cruelty, the abject, and the inhumanity of amusement.”2
Rachel Kent, “Rina Banerjee: The Global Traveler,” in Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World, ed. Jodi Throckmorton (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; and San José, CA: San José Museum of Art, 2018), 90. ↩︎
Rina Banerjee, in interview with Courtney J. Martin, in Wild Things (Brandts, Denmark: Kunsthallen Brandts, 2010), 28. ↩︎
Rina Banerjee’s titles rebel against the English language and its global dominance. Though written in English, they are long and poetic with eccentric spellings—as the artist explained, “an attempt to massage it to speak for a vast number of people who use it sparingly, awkwardly, creatively under the pressure of globalization, colonization, and commercialization of English culture.”1 Banerjee’s enigmatic and dramatic titles are essential elements of her work, conceived after the object’s completion. Like the materials in her sculptures, words unite and collide beautifully and awkwardly; they evoke harmonies and contradictions and capture a sense of global cultural hybridity.
Jodi Throckmorton, “Make Me a Summary of the World,” in Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; and San José, CA: San José Museum of Art, 2018), 21. ↩︎
Rina Banerjee engages ideas related to intersectional feminism—considering women’s overlapping identities based on race, class, and religion—together with the impacts of climate change. The flower is a common motif in her work, variously referring to femininity, fecundity, and nature. Winter’s Flower… (2010), which is fashioned with materials both faux and natural and borrowed from fashion and home décor, is a kind of chimera—its grafted elements suggest an alternative vision for human interaction with our planet.
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