Rina Banerjee (IND, 1963)

– incorporeert de beeldtaal en iconografie van haar moederland in collages en assemblages waarin ze vegetatie en ‘etnische’ objecten verwerkt.

Kort cv
Rina Banerjee werd in India geboren, maar verhuisde al op jonge leeftijd naar de VS en studeerde daar aan de Yale School of Art. Ze nam deel aan tentoonstellingen zoals de Whitney Biennale New York en de Greater New York Show in PS1 Gallery, New York. Haar werk wordt getoond in de Verenigde Staten, Europa en Azië. Rina Banerjee wordt o.a. vertegenwoordigd door Galerie Volker Diehl, Berlijn en Nathalie Obadia in Parijs.

Opleiding
Yale University, Yale School of Art, Painting and Print Making, Master of Fine Art
Case Western Reserve University, Case Institute of Technology, Polymer Eng., Bachelor of Science

Recente tentoonstellingen:
2009 Galerie Nathalie Obadia , Brussel
2008 Allure , Gallery Espace, New Delhi
2008 Art Unlimited, Art Basel 39, Basel
2007 Shanghai Art Fair, Solo Show with Galerie Nathalie Obadia, China-Shanghai exhibition Center
2007 The Wilderness Within, Galerie Volker Diehl, Berlijn
2006 Foreign Fruit, Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Parijs

Werk in de tentoonstelling (bg, stadskant, achterwand)

1. Sweet chesse and harvest flowers draped the meat’s head with blessings of weddings (2008)
   feathers, beaver skull, rat skull shells, nylon (plumes, crane de castor, crane de rat recouvert de coquillages, fils en nylon, variable dimensions, wall mount sculpture
   
   
2. This winter brew blistered her cheeks made of hot peppercorns and fuzzy pearl onions wilted her masters tough meat (2008)
   horn, rope, thread, plastic figures, beads, fur balls, wire, leather brass bells, 84 x 40,5 x 51 cm, wall mount sculpture
   
   
3. For the Love of Falling Fearless upon flowers burning orange and prickly too as are Empires and Rajas, Queens fail (2008)
   ink acrylic on Mylar , Size: 104 x 180 cm
   
   
4. The alterity of nature in the Tropics, devoured by an urban curiousity displayed her serpent as a jewelled dragonn-snake, positioned Adam with an aurora of normalcy, illuminated Eve's otherside" (2007)
   Floor piece (snake in wooden coffin with large gourd and a vintage library light clips to lid of coffin), 55.88 x 40.64 x33.02 cm

Courtesy the Artist, courtesy Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris-Bruxelles

Fragment catalogustekst (Robbert Roos)
Rina Banerjee hoeft niet ver te zoeken voor inspiratie voor de magische wereld die ze in haar sculpturen en tekeningen oproept. Ze grijpt terug op de rijke traditie van haar culturele roots: India. De weelderige florale wereld, de rituele, folkloristische motieven, ze worden door Banerjee ingezet voor een verbeelding die symbolisch geladen is en vol suggestieve, transcendentale componenten zit. De wandsculpturen zien er uit als 'totems', in de tekening zweeft 'de mens' letterlijk in een eigen wereld boven de 'echte' wereld.

Aanvullende informatie / opinies
(1) Rina Banerjee's work explores specific colonial moments that reinvent place and identity as complex diasporic experiences, their aesthetic and cultural beginnings suggest in particular how the many regional culture affects continue to stain our perceptions of home, the exotic, the foreign and domestic worlds. Her system of assemblage' of colonial objects, souveniers and decorative crafts make the experience of seeing artifact and history in art making as an entangled process which reconfigure our boundaries and those trespasses that occur with increased mobility. The global place is garden made out of travel both real and imagined and illusionary world.
She began her education/profession as a material science engineer hence the artwork has a sense of material awareness often mixing the organic and plastic to invite a blurring of our recognition. She creates sculptures, installations, videos and drawings inspired by a wide range of mundane objects, home crafts, and her imagery stem from multiple cultural histories both eastern and western art. Rina's characteristically mischievous process of transformation of objects and their cultural locations playfully unhinges them from their unique specificity. The result has been both a fragmented object that offered a new way of seeing the culture. Her use of narrative text which decorate the work with meaning and intention further playing with the idea of artist voice and the aesthetic of exotic beauty physical illusion of ornamental object as sign.
(4) Barry Schwabsky: Rina Banerjee was one of those new faces that got lost in the crowd at this year's Whitney Biennial. Her sculpture went unmentioned in most reviews, and where her presence was noted, she must have regretted it: Jerry Saltz, for instance, discussed her work in terms of "generic installation art" in his review for the Village Voice. But a recent full-scale solo show and a simultaneous project-room installation have brought her work into focus for those of us who gave her short shrift earlier in the year, and it turns out to be a compelling mix of visual pungency and literary guile, a subtle blend of sensuality and irony.
Yet even when seen in quantity, Banerjee's work remains as elusive as it is vivid, which may be why it did not attract much notice in the mob scene of a Biennial. The way her sculptures hug the wall suggests an aversion to drawing too much attention. The identity of each piece seems to be transitory, situational, making it hard to tell where one work leaves off and another begins. For instance, a single, almost paragraph-long title beginning In the land of milk and fat (all works 2000) turned out to cover what looked like three separate installations on a wall at Admit One Gallery. There was a physical spareness in a lot of the pieces, a demonstrated desire to eke the most resonance out of the least material. But the extravagant range of materials--blueprints, twigs, beaded pins, lightbulbs, sari cloth, saran wrap, rubber tubing, etc.--hardly projected restraint or modesty; rather, Banerjee's strategy seems to be mainly one of stealth. The sculptures tend to sneak up on you: On close inspection, abstract form s seem to be spying on you with googly doll eyes, or preparing to crawl away on insect legs.
Born in Calcutta, Banerjee has been a US resident since childhood. Undoubtedly her dual identity has determined her chosen subject: the lure and fear of the exotic. As the title of one work has it, In the Garden: Scientists dreamed of penetrating this forbidden vegetable kingdom that was Asia. They even welcomed an uncertain danger, tired as they were of the "Age of Reason." Such titles--their very length mimics the notion of profligate, irrational vegetative growth common to orientalist fantasy--give literary expression to an ambiguity that emerges just as dearly in the formal nuances of the sculpture, in which organic and synthetic, Eastern and Western mix promiscuously. Raymond Schwab, the French scholar who proclaimed the age of Romanticism to have been an "Oriental Renaissance" in which Western culture renewed itself through Indian, Middle Eastern, and Chinese thought, noted that it was in the realm of the plastic arts that Europe remained hopelessly resistant, experiencing "terror in the face of the mul tiform gods ... to whom one could always add another appendage intended to divert it into various adjacent, but contradictory, actions." Banerjee appears intent on taunting viewers with their own chimerical imaginings of the seductive yet threatening East. Oddly, she makes giving in to them and resisting them seem equally compelling.

Links en verwijzingen

1. www.rinabanerjee.net ook links naar relevante pers
2. www.galerie-obadia.com
3. ART IN REVIEW; Rina Banerjee - New York Times
4. Rina Banerjee - Brief Article | ArtForum | Find Articles at BNET