What am I made of and how do you know my name?: Rina Banerjee
Ota Fine Arts is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition by Rina Banerjee starting on 22 November, 2013.
Rina Banerjee was born in Kolkata, India in 1963 and moved with her family to the UK, where she spent her child hood. The family then moved to the USA and she is now based in New York where she has come in contact with an international audience through exhibitions such as the Yokohama Triennial(2011) and the solo exhibition at Musée Guimet in Paris(2011).
Epecially known for her use of found objects from different cultures such as colorful bird feathers, a replica of the horn of an American Buffalo, Japanese mosquito nets and old medicine chests, she creates sculptures and installations which skillfully merges the symbolic motifs from the colonial period with organics / inorganics. Gathering objects from various places she combines them into something larger and transforms the original meaning of each object to create a new visual language. Her drawings also shows another world of mixed variety and ancient mythology while displaying human like figures holding four hands and dancing in an upside down space with floating pollen and pollutants. Through her own hybrid cultural settings, Banerjee looks over this world of all kinds of collages and dismantles the meaning of confronting concepts such as West and East, reality and fantasy, nature and artificiality. She then questions what we can see between these parameters and the manner in which we understand how the future arrives.
For her new works for this exhibition, Banerjee confronted the fundamental question of who we are and the problem of identity in this digital world. She answers this by viewing the natural world and human world as opposite mirrors. 'Like clouds consist of molecular of water, our character needs layers of accumulation until it can be visible in the society.' Who we are is decided by what we choose and how we show ourselves. Especially in this digital society where we seem to be able to shape our own identity freely, how do we choose who (what) to be? Subjective to her identity as a member of diaspora, Banerjee reminds that in this world we are all already members of a multi-cultural, hybrid existence.
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Rina BanerjeeGround had risen to sprout new plant, uttered first spoken its difference from black black soil toward a white tight sky, a colored sapling winged but bashful gifted a diversity with one sharp bite of chromosomes monstrous as it devoured what it is in air, 2013Feathers, glass beads, glass vials, steel, wire, acrylic horn, ceramic ball and horn90 (H) x 45(W) x 60 (L) cm
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Rina BanerjeeGroundlessness made them different caught them out in the open, boundless and against instinctual suspicion they knew now of unequalness like twine this arrested, dropped some disguise, allusions moistened reversed her garden of alienation, 2013Acrylic, ink, water color paper101.7 x 151.8 cm
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Rina BanerjeeYellow and watery bathed in seeds of wooded blossoms sprayed to freckled in a soupy air cultures sized and social would enable and he and she and those I knew not as either of these say they saw with shut eyes sharp and frightful a world forced to survive, 2013Acrylic, ink, water color paper111.5 x 67.5 cm
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Rina BanerjeeSplit in parts her right, her left and this other back bent wide side had to stamp away fast than last apart from that she clamored around sounds of reach -purple and inky blinking clenched her pelvis twice, teased, raptured by chase above a green rising , 2013Acrylic, ink, water color paper61.0 x 45.5 cm
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Rina BanerjeeShe sweated and thought the task of the larger, the longer, and the taller, the stronger, the smarter even those healthier is to soil all response, to reject resemblances, doubles even lusty tired equality that strives to fail-hates imposters who echo be , 2013Acrylic, ink, water color paper61.0 x 45.5 cm
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Rina BanerjeeFriendly Fertility and Fuel - when she twinkled the stars signaled and swallowed like they where eating green pickles. This and that went past one million years perhaps one pinky and truly inky cloud rushed and wrinkled this planet's surface with stinky n, 2012Acrylic, ink, steel, watercolor paper38.5 x 29 cm
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Rina BanerjeeA heart of two anchors, take one bird and take one butcher, from ear to ear, it's a familiar end yet she was with a wide grin, while meat and medicine poured, even played with the poverty of country, was still an unknown friend! So she withdrew her smile , 2011Mosquito net, fish bone, umbrella, artificial horn and pigeon, feathers231 x 109 x 96.5 cm