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.