Take me, Take me... to the Palace of Love, 2003 courtesy of Galerie Nathalie Obadia,...

“Chimeras of India and the West” by Indian born American artist Rina Banerjee is the third exhibition in the series of Musée Guimet’s ambitious project, “The Manufactory of Contemporary Art in Asia,” which explores the interaction of ancient heritages and modern-day creativity. Installed at the heart of the permanent collections, Banerjee’s hybrid, poetic compositions enter into resonant interplay with the works held by the museum, which date back hundreds and thousands of years, offering a new angle on Asian civilisations and their complex relations with the West.
Sensual sculptures made of shells, animal skulls, feathers and Indian fabrics; spectacular installations combining colonial objects and plastic materials found in the streets of New York; dream drawings in exotic colours depicting the body in a trance state – when laid out in the singular space-time of the Museum, Banerjee’s works express – more powerfully, no doubt, than they would in the neutral arena of an art gallery – the ambiguities of her twofold identity as a product of both East and West, the illusions bequeathed by the past and the “chimeras” of the new age, the contradictions of the post-colonial world and the underside of globalisation.
Within these walls laden with history, saturated with sociological and religious signs, Banerjee’s works conjure up a pantheon of demigods, of warlike female figures and fabulous animals, conveying the complexity of cultural mixes and the constant struggle forpower between civilisations.

Upon civilizing home an absurd and foreign fruit grew ripened, made food for the others, grew snout, tail and appendage like no other, 2010, Courtesy Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Bruxelles

Born in Calcutta in 1963, Rina Banerjee left India for England and then the United States with her family when she was a young child. Trained as an engineer, she obtained a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Yale in 1995 and settled in New York, while maintaining close links with her homeland thanks to numerous stays in Asia.
Informed by this singular background, Banerjee’s work articulates a unique synthesis of mythologies and religions, anthropology and fairytales, exoticism and mass tourism. Challenging the order of the world in an explosive mix of imagination and materials, her delicate yet danger-tinged work gives rise to creatures that are constantly mutating, and sometimes monstrous, like metaphors of a world in a state of constant becoming.
The exhibition at Musée Guimet runs until September 26th.
 
Parallel to her exhibition at the Musée Guimet, Rina Banerjee will be showing her most recent works at Galerie Nathalie Obadia, her gallery since 2005, which runs until July 13th.
For more information visit:   www.guimet.fr

Published 09.06.2011