Take Me to the Palace of Love
Project Leads: Romita Ray, associate professor of art and music histories, Vanja Malloy, director and chief curator of the Syracuse University Art Museum, and Ankush Arora, graduate student, art and music histories
Can we rescue love? That is the question posed by acclaimed artist Rina Banerjee, whose exhibition “Take Me to the Palace of Love,” will be on view at SU Art Museum in Spring 2023. An immigrant artist who was born in India, Banerjee’s art is shaped by her first-hand experience witnessing how love can go awry when ethnic and racial differences are leveraged to divide instead of to unite.
Her exhibition at Syracuse is inspired by “Take Me…to the Palace of Love“ (2003), one of Banerjee’s noted art installations about home and diaspora whose focal point, a pink saran-wrap Taj Mahal, will be exhibited at the Syracuse University Art Museum alongside “Viola, from New Orleans” (2017), a multi-media work that explores inter-racial marriage in America, and “A World Lost” (2013), another multi-media installation that critiques climate change. These artworks will be complemented by folk art from India, African masks, Indian sculpture, other items from the museum’s collections, as well as artworks from additional museums in Central New York. Rooted in cultural memory and storytelling, the exhibit collectively asks: What role does love play in identity-formation and place-making? And how does love shape or resist gendered and racialized identities?
With support from the EHN mini-grant, “Take Me to the Palace of Love” will be extended into the City of Syracuse, allowing the University community and new American and underrepresented communities to document their own stories about identity and place—individually and collectively—in dialogue with Banerjee who will be in residence as the University’s Jeannette K. Watson Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities in the spring. The public will be invited to participate in the installation by producing short essays, poetry, fiction, podcasts, or short videos that will be curated in close consultation with Banerjee. Exhibition curators Romita Ray and Vanja Malloy, and community engagement coordinator Brice Nordquist will also contribute to the catalogue and solicit and select contributions from members of the University and Syracuse communities.
The catalogue will be housed on the SU Art museum’s website, allowing it to become a dynamic site of knowledge-sharing and knowledge-building within and across different communities. There will also be a public display in the city of Syracuse at a site to be determined.
