Blending love of culture & mythology with that of varied materials & surfaces

Born in Kolkata in 1963, Rina Banerjee left India for England and then the United States with her family when she was a young child. Trained as an engineer, she obtained a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Yale in 1995 and settled in New York, while maintaining close links with her homeland thanks to numerous stays in Asia.

Informed by this singular background, Banerjee’s work articulates a unique synthesis of mythologies and religions, anthropology and fairytales, exoticism and mass tourism. Challenging the order of the world in an explosive mix of imagination and materials, her delicate yet danger-tinged work gives rise to creatures that are constantly mutating, and sometimes monstrous, like metaphors of a world in a state of constant becoming.

The artist has a fascination for materials, heritage textiles, fashion, colonial objects and furnishings, historical architecture, and their ability to disguise, animate, locate their inherent meanings in her artwork. The sculptures and drawings, paintings and videos are a fusion of cultures and an explosion of imagination. She states her work explores "specific colonial moments that reinvent place and identity as complex diasporic experiences."

Her preoccupation with the role of culture, mythology, fairy tales, anthropology, ethnography fold the trajectories of race, exotic capital, and the forces of our migration, mobility with tourism and global commerce. Tensions and desires created out of our individual increased travel and access to information technologies have preforiated our boundaries creating a malleability that manages a globalized sense of space and a diminished experience of dominant culture paradigm.

All these facets of her works are evident in a show at Musée Guimet, Paris. After the exhibitions by Chu Teh-Chun and Hung-Chih Peng (summer 2009), followed by Rashid Rana and Chen Zhen (summer-autumn 2010), “Chimeras of India and the West” continues the Musée Guimet’s ambitious project, “The Manufactory of Contemporary Art in Asia,” exploring the interaction of ancient heritages and modern-day creativity.

(Information courtesy: The artist official bio & Musée Guimet, Paris)