Rina Banerjee

Known for her large-scale sculpture and installation assembled from found materials, Banerjee captures the experiences of diasporic communities worldwide. The artist’s childhood and adolescence was spent in several different places – Kolkata, Manchester, London, New York – and her work is influenced by her own multinationalism and encounters with multiculturalism. Questions of identity, ethnicity, tradition and social engagement are inherent to her practice, which celebrates diversity whilst exploring the harmful impacts of globalisation. Her work is critical of the centralisation of power to a shrinking, delocalised few.

 

Banerjee’s non-hierarchical approach to material results in mystical assemblages, extravagantly composed, that reflect on migration and such consequent themes as personal and collective memory, and local and global community. Bringing together a variety of natural and synthetic materials, woven and beaded textiles, and tourist trinkets collected from around the world, Banerjee’s work comments on the transformation of consumerism from a local marketplace to an ever-widening surrender to international cosmopolitanism. The scavenged or unearthed objects with which she makes her sculptures range from low craft associated with folk culture, to objects with more ‘exotic’ or expensive origins. Her compelling assemblages surrender objects and antiques to mythologies that cross multiple cultural and geographical locations.

 

Communication through commerce is a key concern for the artist. Alongside this, Banerjee interrogates colonial attitudes to land ownership and freedom of movement, responding critically to exceptionalism, whether national or individual. Her figurative drawings evoke dreamscapes featuring jazz era and science fiction motifs, as well as exploring the ways in which migration brings about positive social transformation. In these works, the rapacity of our present and future gives way to a fantasy in which freedom, flexibility and resilience track the journey towards emancipation from the negative effects of globalisation. Banerjee’s politics perforate boundaries and associations forged out of race, immigration, and gender, willing into being a humanistic inquiry into individualism. Her use of animal, celestial and elemental metaphors such as alligators, birds, the moon, planets, fish, snakes, clouds and fire ruminate on both the natural world and human nature.