Rina Banerjee: Migration’s Breath

Migration’s Breath, a solo exhibition featuring new sculptures, works on paper and lithographs by Indian-born, New York-based artist Rina Banerjee (b. 1969, Kolkata) will be showcased at Ota Fine Arts in Singapore. Having grown up in mixed cultural communities and urban sites as far apart as Kolkata and New York City, Rina Banerjee’s multi-faceted creations fuse the boundaries between East and West while seeking for a more globalised, permeable sense of space and history. Conscious of our increased mobility with tourism and accumulated capital, her work contemplates the meaning of the exotic in thewake of colonialism, the forces and trajectories of migration and diaspora, and the traces they leave behind. For her frst solo presentation in Singapore, Banerjee has titled the exhibition Migration’s Breath — extracted from a longer run-on sentence that straddles a fantastical line between a brief allegory and symbolic poetry. Like many of her other works’ titles, though at frst glance they may seem random or nonsensical, each word is in fact carefully chosen to bear signifcance. In this instance, the fuller title is a tale of the cross-fertilisation of cultures, languages and trade, opening and collapsing differences so that a singular, united humanity. As sensitive as Rina Banerjee is towards multiple textual meanings and linguistic legacies in her titles, so she is also with the materials she uses in her work.

For Migration’s Breath, she has prepared four new sculptures, six works on paper and two lithographs. In all of these strains, through the technique of collage, Banerjee is able to appropriately represent the density of the urban experience by suggesting disparate phenomena and ideas to coexist within the same framework.

Though easily found in thrift stores or street markets, each of the objects used in her sculptures are selected with awareness of their origins and manufacturing heritages. She uses items as varied as feathers, textiles, epoxy horns, beads and umbrellas to explore the material manifestations of anthropology, ethnography, mythologies and the Indian diaspora. Banerjee frst dismantles and then “reclaims” their readymade status into the hand-made, underlining their unique value and reconstructing them into exquisite metaphors for the urban, post-colonial, expatriated community of which she is a part. This exhibition represents a cross-section of this fascinating body of research and work.