Rina Banerjee’s richly detailed paintings and sculptural assemblages convene a cast of shapeshifting travellers. They voyage with colourful, patterned and ruffled garments, and striking adornments. Their bodies unfurl with streams of hair behind them, as if suspended in flight or floating. Sometimes, they halt their journeys, momentarily resting on a chair or the ground, yet they are never entirely at rest. They carry extraordinary objects, gathered from far-reaching destinations: cowrie shells, velvet, patterned paper, a sculptural head, feathers, sari trim, antique glass bottles and sequins. These objects appear both culturally specific but also generic, like souvenirs or products of the global tourism industry, ubiquitous yet hard to place.
Yet, these figures themselves are not tourists, they are travellers. They do not visit other places unchanged. Their costumes and props help them cross borders, to alter their appearances, take on new identities or adapt to local customs. As they travel, they shapeshift, reimagining themselves while accumulating traits, memories and objects.
These movements and reimaginations, across place and form, point to the diasporic experience, which is continually changing, complex, multiple, and unequal. Banerjee’s travellers offer a powerful image of a hybrid identity not built between two fixed places, but continually remade through transformation and translation. This topic has been central to her practice since early mixed-media works such as Infectuous Migrations (1999).
Banerjee’s figures become travellers within what James Clifford calls ‘contact zones', spaces where cultures, histories and people meet, negotiate and transform one another. Her travellers accumulate the traces of their journeys but also the cultural histories of the objects they carry. In her work, materials, forms and experiences translate between contexts, gathering new associations along the way.
This travelling condition resonates with Banerjee’s own history. Her family’s movement from East Bengal after Partition to Calcutta, and subsequently to the UK and the US, is marked by different forms of displacement and migration, out of necessity as well as prospect. Her ties are multiple, shaped by political histories, economic circumstances, cultural affiliations and personal memories. Her work navigates the complex geography of belonging, probing where ‘home’ and ‘elsewhere’ might be located. Her creatures’ destination remains unknown; instead, they remain in motion, unsettling the idea of return.
The exhibition at Vadehra Art Gallery adds another leg to this journey. What happens when these travelling works are shown in a South Asian context? What happens to the ‘elsewhere’ from which the characters have been imagined when they arrive there? Their return complicates the direction of diasporic movement. Rather than moving from homeland to elsewhere, or the elsewhere back home, Banerjee’s works travel back and forth between multiple contexts, carrying with them accumulated histories of collecting, migration, and translation.
Banerjee’s work explores diasporic experiences in a post-globalizing world. Who has the right to cross boundaries? What happens when things cannot travel and translate? Is there a point of return? Vadehra Art Gallery then becomes a site of encounter, a contact zone: a place where objects, memories can continue to be renegotiated rather than be resolved.
- Emily Butler