by David M. Roth
Is Rina Banerjee exploiting Orientalism, criticizing it or simply invoking the visual tropes of her native culture to say what’s on her mind? Questions like these have swirled around the artist from the moment she burst onto the scene in the early 2000s, a byproduct of her hybrid status (born in Kolkata, raised in New York ) and the globalization of the art market which began around the time her career took flight — in major museum exhibitions, top-tier art fairs and biennials seemingly everywhere.
Her oeuvre encompasses everything from room-filling installations and sculptures made of kitschy objects (textiles, baubles, trinkets) to intimate watercolors populated by fantastic imagery reminiscent of that seen in Indian and Persian miniatures. The consensus (i.e., the curatorial) view is that Banerjee’s commenting on postcolonial legacies, transnational flows of capital, excess consumption, gender identity, and a good many other subjects that have long been trending within academia. But I wonder: is that what’s really driving her?
Consider the title of her current exhibition: Freedom wonders inside the fantastic, joyous, in relentless dreams free from constraints with movements wandering rotating entangled sinuous perpetual and glowing in effortless being and while wielding free will as “metallic otherness” we reach ourselves, our true selves, as singular and connected, diverse forever searching. If that weren’t enough – and for Banerjee it isn’t – she appends similar stream-of-consciousness titles to most every work she produces, a sure indication that personal – not political – considerations are the operative forces. As such, Freedom wonders borders on being as much a literary event as it is visual one.
Unlike past exhibitions that featured large installations and monumental sculptures, this show consists primarily of modestly scaled drawings. It includes one major installation and a handful of wall- and pedestal-mounted sculptures, but nothing comparable in scale to what she’s shown previously in this space and in a traveling retrospective organized in 2019 by the San Jose Museum of Art.
Here, the absence of spectacle is a plus; it allows us to peer deeper inside the mind of an artist who, for too long, has been linked to forces that few artists, save perhaps the late Mark Lombardi, actually wake up pondering. What we mostly see are self-portraits of a woman engaged in a struggle for transformation fueled by a florid imagination, made visible in drawings in which the artist employs painted shapes and collaged elements that portray her as a fluid, shape-shifting creature — adrift in aquatic, floral and microbiological environments populated by other species among which she feels an obvious kinship.
Unseasonably Submerged…, for example, shows the artist’s face wedded to the body of what looks like a bioluminescent fish. She calls it, in a characteristic title which I’m abbreviating, an unnatural being…waiting for rebirth on earth. “Rebirth” could, in fact, be the exhibition’s title; it’s surely a connecting thread. In the oriental tale, Banerjee portrays herself as a mustachioed bridegroom holding a prehensile tail shaped like a whale. “She liked it severed forever,” Banerjee writes tellingly. In Timeless birds to be watched…, the artist
situates her body against a swirling background of marbleized paper with an enormous starfish floating at her feet. An occult beneath created…shows the artist as a four-legged beast, her arms growing out her back like the wings of a cherub. Other pictures conjure watery worlds where she shares space with yet other creatures, exulting in her ability to mingle among them as co-equals. In two other pictures she’s busting dance moves, giddy in her new-found freedom.
Other titles reinforce that impression:
Affinity and intimacy, no excess of miracles could explain my elephant myself as one.
The magical, fantastic and bizarre collaborated to form herself assertiveness a kind of consciousness, agency.
Life after death, freed, in a shell that remains, dismantled and repurposed, diligently loose and now mobile when unearthed evokes new skin where once like hermit and Houdini combined living is entangled now awake slip out to free, see, feel speak.
So you heard me the Brown-headed Nuthatch crow, climb high free me, my heart, my vote.
The remainder of the show consists of a multi-part installation, which I’m at a loss to interpret, and a series of small sculptures. The latter read (for the most part) as fetish objects, owing to a combination of organic elements (gourds, cowrie shells, an animal horn) fused to found and Internet-sourced objects (textiles, sequins, beads, feathers, fake hair) whose indeterminate origins curators have cited as evidence of Banerjee’s desire to represent the myriad dislocations felt by immigrants. But I wonder about that, too. Can mass-produced objects, no matter how skillfully combined, give off the same mojo as actual fetish objects, built from things imbued with the sweat, filth and aura of living beings? That’s a vital question, but here it’s a secondary issue since drawings are the main event. They represent a struggle of a different sort: that of an individual who’s striving to define who she is and what she might become – independent of whatever labels observers might affix.
Do such efforts, based on ancient traditions, play into entrenched Orientalism or do they combat it? For Banerjee, whose immediate cohorts in this realm include artists like Shahzia Sikander, Wangechi Mutu and Shiva Amadhi, there aren’t a lot of alternatives. Like immigrants everywhere, they use what they’ve got. If that complicates the interpretation of their work, well, so be it. It comes with the territory.
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Rina Banerjee: “Freedom wonders inside the fantastic, joyous, in relentless dreams free from constraints with movements wandering rotating entangled sinuous perpetual and glowing in effortless being and while wielding free will as ‘metallic otherness’ we reach ourselves, our true selves, as singular and connected, diverse forever searching” @ Hosfelt Gallery through June 29, 2024.
About the author: David M. Roth is the editor, publisher, and founder of Squarecylinder, where, since 2009, he has published over 400 reviews of Bay Area exhibitions. He was previously a contributor to Artweek and Art Ltd. and senior editor for art and culture at the Sacramento News & Review.
