The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

‘It’s not like the 1960s when the found object was the found object …’ 1 RINA BANERJEE Rina Banerjee is a collector. She collects materials both natural and synthetic, new and old. Much of what she buys is gleaned from junk shops situated in the vicinity of her Manhattan home. Like a bricoleur, she uses the junk she finds to construct something new, something for which the things she collects were not originally intended. She transforms, with a couturier’s attention to construction, the world’s seemingly inconsequential detritus into mixed-media assemblages that are difficult to unravel and beautiful to look at. They are hung protruding from walls or situated on gallery floors, appearing simultaneously as self-contained, finished objects and wildly variable, imaginative things. If the inspiration for the creation of each piece begins with a found object, where that object will lead the artist is less determined. Born in Calcutta (now Kolkata), and raised in London and New York, Banerjee’s art gives form to the idea that through the history of empires, colonisation, global trade and globalisation, an entanglement — an infinitely messy web of exchange — exists between continents, cultures, objects and tastes. Her art speaks to the complexity of cultural identity exacerbated through the migrant experience and international tourism. From her American home she manufactures unique souvenirs from the world culture in which she lives. The desire to acquire and display beautiful exotic objects has a long history, much longer than the history of consumerism. But with the establishment in the seventeenth century of the British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company — the world’s first multinational companies — exotic products from India began to flood European markets. Between 1600 and 1800 India was the world’s greatest exporter of textiles. Indian chintz was highly prized in Europe for patchwork, quilting, domestic decoration and dressmaking — so much so in fact, that at one point the fabric was barred from importation into Britain due to the economic threat it posed to the country’s own textile industry. The appeal of Indian fabric to the European consumer lay both in its brilliant colouring and in the ability of the dyes used to maintain their vibrancy (Indian manufacturers used mordants, fixing agents not known in Europe at the time). As markets grew for the textiles, inevitably, so too did the modifications of indigenous Indian designs for Western tastes. Imported and locally produced products alike became hybrids of the original product. This web of exchange now encompasses the globe. The accelerated movement of product, capital and people across national borders means that, while not erased, the gaps between places, cultures and communities are narrower than ever before. The complexity of constructing, or deconstructing, this system of interconnectedness is reflected in the choice of materials and the intricate, hand-worked technique that Banerjee employs to construct her hybrid creatures, just as it is in the language she finds to describe her art. As the title of one work indicates, the words she finds suggest that words alone are not enough to convey the complexity of the situation or what the artist is trying to articulate: A mad woman, an eternal Eve, a monkey cheated leaped, from limb to limp in open air, curled a mischievous and bulbous melancholy in tail that sailed and with a single cough, a sudden drip, a curtain of bubbles, tears spilled to send land and liquids, fertilize, all fluid migrations leaking abroad and across. Like myth or folkloric tradition, or perhaps even archaic Shakespearian language (part history and part storytelling), real and concocted aspects combine in sentences that mimic the composite nature of her sculptures. Both grammatically confused and consciously constructed, they evoke long rambling journeys across the globe, across language, anthropology, popular culture and personal memory. Sometimes recalling sentimental music hall lyrics and at other times nonsensical, cut up or stream-of-consciousness poetry, Banerjee’s titles reiterate the linguistic principle that syntax alters the meaning of individual words. Syntax (derived from the ancient Greek, meaning literally ‘arrangement’, ‘together’, ‘an ordering’) refers to the rules and principles that govern the structure of sentences in any given language. That the definition and spelling of words are altered in relation to how they appear in sentences — one of the main reasons why translations are so fraught with misinterpretations — mirrors the structural principle behind Rina Banerjee’s assemblages. It is always in relation to larger structures that the individual elements of culture are understood, or indeed, misunderstood. Sally Foster 1 Presentation by Rina Banerjee, Asia Art Archive in America , 20 October 2011, <http://www.aaa-a.org/2011/12/20/presentationby- rina-banerjee/>, viewed 12 June 2012. RINA BANERJEE The abundance of things 92