Cross-Cultural Kinship:
Rina Banerjee

Rina Banerjee, who was born in Kolkata, India and lives in New York, works with a cosmopolitan eclecticism that reflects both her transnational background and her sophisticated understanding of the narrative power of objects. Using trinkets made for the tourist trade — horn, bone, feathers, shells, textiles, glass bottles and antiques — she assembles rapturous sculptures that are mystifyingly shamanistic, yet overflowing with connotation. Her works are hyper-ornamented and lushly seductive. Conjoining rarities with cheap, mass-produced bric-a-brac, she appropriates extravagantly while rejecting hierarchies of material, culture and value.

In Banerjee’s paintings and delicate drawings on paper, female figures float in chimerical landscapes, often in states of transformation or with hybrid features of birds and beasts. Her titles are long, free-form refrains that immerse the viewer in the physical and emotional space of the work, heightening its quasi-mystical magnetism.

In a 2011 feature in Artforum, Banerjee describes the foundations of her work:

My mother told me that my first name is special because it is not typical in India—it is spelled differently. Hence, I was free to be what I wanted, or so I presumed. I was born in Calcutta, but I grew up in London and, then, New York, where I now live. Growing up abroad [as we called it] was a strange experience in the 1960s; there were so few Indians in the West. My parents saw themselves as international citizens. Maybe they imagined a future that we are just beginning to glimpse. I dream of this willingness to close the gaps between cultures, communities, and places. I think of identity as inherently foreign; of heritage as something that leaks away from the concept of home—as happens when one first migrates. Even my interest in science embodies an awareness of other worlds, worlds that coexist with us, but which we cannot experience or know. The sky, the stars, and the earth contain so much more than we think.

Freedom is the most expensive commodity; nature the most dangerous beauty. My work examines both. My art depicts a delicate world that is also aggressive, tangled, manipulated, fragile, and very, very dense.

The production of the Contagious Migrations originally began in 2000 with an older iteration of the sculpture titled Infectious Migrations, which was part of the 2000 Whitney Biennial. Originally conceived in the aftermath of the AIDS crisis, the piece critiques the construction of a disease-ridden ‘other,’ and the intercorrelation of illness with systemic oppressions, such as homophobia, racism, and xenophobia. 

The background of the piece is composed of found hand-drawn exhaust and ventilation maps from the Columbia University Center of Disease and Control from 1968, and points to another historical moment in which fear of disease was imbued with systemic oppression. 1968 was a year of a flu pandemic in the United States, which was caused by a flu strain derived from China and led to a surge of racism and violence toward East Asian peoples. 

The piece is ripe with medical residue: plastic tubing, latex and rubber gloves. The tubing underscores the phenomena of transmission, referencing both the transmission of medicines, as well as the global movement of people, goods, and disease via colonization, enslavement, immigration, or trade. The piece also contains elements of or associated with the human body such as fake fingernails and eyelashes, highlighting the human beings impacted by both disease and persecution. 

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