Rina Banerjee
June 2023
When the bottom falls out and the weight of Earth against Us cannot center (detail), 2022, mixed media on paper (framed), 22 3/4 x 16 inches. Photograph by Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
“Black Noodles delivers multiple stories that align with history, and the story of how currency is, and commodities are, made from the earth, from plants and animals, and even from humans.”
—Rina Banerjee
Shristi Sainani speaks with the artist about her multi-layered work and recent exhibition at Perrotin in New York.
Rina Banerjee (b.1963) is a New York-based artist. Originally from Kolkata, India, she creates multi-faceted sculptures, paintings, and drawings that fuse the boundaries between East and West. Banerjee’s choice of material and subject questions the experiences of femininity, climate change, migration, commerce, and identity in a globalized world. Her sculptures place in conversation cultural objects, textiles, domestic items, mythologies, and the material residue of colonialism.
Shristi Sainani: What were your first memories around art? Was there a moment of epiphany when you thought you had found your calling?
Rina Banerjee: My first memory of art is of this thing that is visual that has a different meaning for every person and, in the safety of that privacy, has a permanence that holds life and can bring one to life with a depth of curiosity that defies gravity. This experience has a permanence of memory that I can share. For example, when I was three years old, I remember my mother when she had just arrived in England. She redesigned the neglected rose garden in Kensington, where we lived. She spent her free time drawing, not only a plan for this garden but also designs for a gold bead necklace and her children’s clothing. Being an immigrant in London with no formal schooling, she also liked to practice writing her signature in English. The name was unusually curly and coiled. This new language posed a struggle for her, and she was defiantly herself not content to be identified solely as female or Bengali, English or American. In creating Black Noodles, I started to think of all things that persist, linger, create impact, drive fertility, fecundity virility, that suggest a powerfulness that is also connected to the body and yet not entirely or only the body like a body with a vast number of appendages – like hair floating on the surface of the water where it widens to move away from the crown. The weighted and weightless feeling, as between origin and periphery, of long tentacles like diaphanous sea creatures, squid, and jellyfish suspended in undersea currents. This is how I make the physical process of building a sculpture relate to the content, a process perhaps best described as a form of synesthesia.
Prey. Flightless, in and out of fear (detail), 2023, acrylic on canvas (framed), 98 x 74 inches. Photograph by Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
SS: Throughout your practice, have there been recurring references? Are there texts, images, myths, curios, or scapes that you revisit from time to time?
RB: Migration, diaspora, culture, and commerce are like this. The echo of a haunting voice, of song; ripples of a sinking ship; tremor of an invisible earthquake; as though all things living have cilia fine hairs in plants and single-celled organisms allowing them to feel, connect and realize their location and intruders; recognize sunlight and wind.
SS: Your recent solo at Perrotin (New York), titled Black Noodles is now open to the public. Please tell our readers a little about its conception. Was there a specific impetus that inspired the body of work presented?
RB: The largest sculpture in the solo at Perrotin Gallery in NYC’s lower east side was made with the space in mind. My goal was to fill the temple-like 3rd-floor space, defined by its four pillars and atrium lighting, with a dome structure suggested by the central void these define. This structure has defined my signature series during my last two decades of work. The diaphanous silk-like membrane on the structure appears like a pearl onion. The ropes, also a regular feature of my sculptures, reflect on one level, on commerce (the shipping industry and the Jute Rope that has fueled the great wealth of Copenhagen in this colonial past) as well as intestines of the body politic that sends out these ropes into the world as feelers or cilia. I use the net-like material, as seen in Black Noodles and elsewhere, e.g., Sita, Earth Dismembered, Made in America, etc., to suggest a filter, like the lungs or stomach, that both screens and directs flows of goods, people, and ideas.
Black Noodles, 2023, forged steel, vintage milk glass, hand-dyed rope, shells, gourds, polyethylene netting, porcupine quill, silk thread, synthetic and human hair, horseshoe crab, polyurethane, ostrich egg, glass, dimensions variable. Photograph by Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
Contagious Migrations, 1999—2023, incense sticks, kumkum, vaseline, turmeric, Indian blouse gauze, fake fingernails and eyelashes, chalk, foam, feathers, fabric, Spanish moss, light bulbs, was, Silly Putty, quilting pins, plastic tubing, latex and rubber gloves, acrylic and dry pigment, dimensions variable. Photograph by Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
SS: You have maneuvered multiple artistic mediums, from paintings and sculptures to elaborate installations as part of Black Noodles. All sculptures on display have animalistic limbs, horns, or feathers; some of which incorporate the sacred markers of kumkum (vermillion powder), turmeric, and shells, while some see uncanny cameos of Silly putty, sequins, fake fingernails, and eyelashes—what, according to you, dictates the materiality of a work?
RB: Black Noodles delivers multiple stories that align with history, and the story of how currency is, and commodities are, made from the earth, from plants and animals, and even from humans. It considers closely how something such as consumption of luxury goods can be considered both a spectacle of power in its desire to monopolize the rare and unique and a self-destructive form of alienation in its remove from the materiality and meaning of things. The international hair trade acquires its product dominantly from Indian women, and its largest consumer are those who live in the United States of America. Hair, like rope is synonymous with strength - tensile, tactile and resilience (softness associated with smooth youthful surface). These words I learned first as an engineer studying polymers or plastics. The very desirable combination that we associate with nylon stockings once made from silk for Western women’s fashions were always a visible marker of wealth and beauty.
Fermented Origins, 2020—2023, rosewood and mixed media, 81 1/2 x 30 x 37 inches. Photograph by Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
Sita's Surrender, 2022—2023, textiles, seashells, silk thread, copper mesh, plastic mesh, beads, 73 × 28 × 25 1/2 inches. Photograph by Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
SS: What was the core propeller behind the show, and some challenges or feats that you would like to share with our readers?
RB: I often like to search for metaphors that relay to me the very entanglement created out of another motion, also durable, resilient, disguising, fragile in appearance, as is the movement of culture. I am in wonder of the migration of labor, of servants that crisscross the oceans to land on hostile shores, submerged in the ideological death of their local culture. And watch amazed as the latter, by way of influence and exchange, is revived to form new identities transformed into the American diaspora. The tide seems to be turning now, however, as many things which have not changed in two decades of fighting to free we from the ambition of hoarding resources runs up against the limitations dictated by material reality. While it is true that the narrow paths that have been created to support global exchange have created new understandings between nations and peoples, they also have expedited a dark vision of the future where humanity and Nature are superfluous and only the mobility of capital is honored.
Rina Banerjee, Black Noodles (installation view), Perrotin, New York, April 26—June 10, 2023. Photograph by Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
Rina Banerjee, Black Noodles (installation view), Perrotin, New York, April 26—June 10, 2023. Photograph by Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
Rina Banerjee, Black Noodles (installation view), Perrotin, New York, April 26—June 10, 2023. Photograph by Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
Rina Banerjee, Black Noodles (installation view), Perrotin, New York, April 26—June 10, 2023. Photograph by Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
SS: Over time, would you say, there are significant shifts an artistic practice undergoes while navigating different contexts (be that institutional or geographical)?
RB: I am happy to surrender to the world of objects this surplus that dominates my little NYC and other urban centers elsewhere which exist no longer in a somewhere. Geographical identity has been lost to availability and retail giants like Amazon. There remains in my thoughts a vast number of things I still want to swallow. Like the hollow inside Moby Dick, I create an alternate, rarefied reality, where things that by themselves do not mean much of anything can gain relevance by the proximity and association, I provide them. Ideally, the juxtaposition of these freighted objects will activate viewers’ own sense of the connections that run through objects and their histories, helping them to imagine alternates to the reality we are all supposedly sharing.
Once an Animal had strayed, 2022, acrylic, ink, and collage on paper (framed), 48 1/4 x 33 inches. Photograph by Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
Inhabitant of one thousand lies, 2020, Venetian marble papers, collage, pencil, ink, and acrylic on paper (framed), 25 3/4 x 33 3/4 inches. Photograph by Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
SS: What are you looking towards next? Are there specific projects you are looking forward to realizing in the near future?
RB: I am looking forward to foraging for many more materials to explore in my vocabulary of things. I would like also to be more involved in film, fashion, architecture, and interior design as a way of feeling and thinking critically about what kind of “public spaces” could be invented to lessen fear in all its negative manifestations.
Rina Banerjee has received considerable international recognition, recently a traveling retrospective (Frist Art Museum in Nashville, San Jose Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts), a survey exhibition at Museé Guimet in Paris, and participation in the 55th and 57th Venice Biennale. She has also been included in important group exhibitions, including The Centre Pompidou, the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Portrait of Rina Banerjee by Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
Shristi Sainani is a curator, designer, researcher, and writer currently based in New Delhi, India, where she functions independently. Her interest lies in dismantling and assessing core concepts of exhibition making, specifically focusing on Contemporary Art churned through the diaspora of the Global South.
She also writes poetry, having published three books in the genre, and has contributed to several art and architectural forums. Her independent research focuses on collections and architecture of private art museums. Shristi's paper on inclusivity in museum spaces won the INSC Researchers Award in 2021.
Shristi is a formally trained architect. She completed her Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Sydney and her Master’s degree in Curatorial Studies from the University of Melbourne.
Rina Banerjee
Black Noodles
Perrotin
New York
April 26—June 10, 2023