Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World

Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World is the first in-depth exploration of the contemporary practice of Bengali American artist Rina Banerjee.

Though Banerjee’s work has been shown extensively in Europe and South Asia, PAFA will be the first North American museum to delve into the artist’s complex and fanciful worlds. Bringing together several of Banerjee’s monumental installations in conversation with 15 to 20 of her sculptures, as well as a selection of works on paper, Make Me a Summary of the World will transform PAFA into an otherworldly and multi-sensory space.

Known for her large-scale sculptures and installations made from materials sourced throughout the world, Banerjee’s works investigate the splintered experiences of identity, tradition, and culture, prevalent in diasporic communities. Using a variety of materials ranging from African tribal jewelry to colorful feathers, light bulbs, and Murano glass, Banerjee’s art celebrates diversity at the material level. These sensuous assemblages present themselves simultaneously as familiar and unfamiliar, thriving on tensions between visual cultures and raising questions about exoticism, cultural appropriation, globalization, and feminism.

In turn, her wider practice challenges current nativist political leanings by proposing a multi-faceted nature of identity; not based exclusively on a person’s culture of origin or gender, but instead on self-identity. These inclusive and freeing conceptions of the “self” manifest themselves throughout Banerjee’s ever-evolving work – in fragmented figures, riotous use of color, and symbolic materials. Paired with her thought-provoking and poetic titles, Banerjee’s works relentlessly query contemporary modes of artistic production and societal engagement.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

Image: Installation view of Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World, PAFA (all works 2018, images courtesy Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts)

Whether or not you go, the exhibition catalog, Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World, is the first in-depth examination of the artist's work, using a selection of Banerjee's large-scale installations along with her sculptures and paintings to consider the artist's place in both American and global frameworks. Amid a turn toward nativist politics in the United States, the work of Indian-born, New York–based artist Rina Banerjee (born 1963) seems particularly relevant, reflecting as it does the splintered experience of identity, tradition and culture prevalent in diasporic communities. Banerjee's fanciful sculptures are made from materials sourced throughout the world―in a single work one can find African tribal jewelry, feathers, light bulbs, Murano glass and South Asian antiques.

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