Rina BanerjeeThe Exotic, Lavish, and Kitschy

Mixed media sculpture in bright pink plastic wrap resembling the Taj Mahal. It is suspended from a vaulted ceiling.
Installation view of Rina Banerjee’s Take me, take me, take me . . . to the Palace of love (2003) in the exhibition Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World, San José Museum of Art, May 16–October 2, 2019. Photo by Johnna Arnold / JKA Photography.

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

  1. 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. ↩︎

  2. Rina Banerjee, in interview with Courtney J. Martin, in Wild Things (Brandts, Denmark: Kunsthallen Brandts, 2010), 28. ↩︎