As part of its Indian Season, spring-summer 2011, the Musée Guimet presents “Chimères de l’Inde et de l’Occident”, contemporary works by Indian-American artist Rina Banerjee.
Installed at the heart of the permanent collections, Rina Banerjee’s hybrid and poetic compositions resonate with the museum’s millennia-old works. Unravelling the interwoven narratives of history right up to the present day, they offer an opportunity to take a fresh look at Asian civilizations and their complex relationships
with the West.
Sensual sculptures combining shells, animal skulls, feathers and Indian fabrics; spectacular installations combining colonial objects and plastic materials found on the streets of New York; dreamlike drawings in exotic colors featuring trance-like bodies… Deployed in the singular time-space of the Museum, Rina
Banerjee’s works express – perhaps more than in the pristine space of the art gallery – the ambiguities of her dual belonging to the Western and Eastern worlds, the illusions inherited from the past and the “chimeras” of the new times, the contradictions of the post-colonial world and the flip side of globalization.
Within walls steeped in history, saturated with sociological and religious signs, Rina Banerjee’s works reveal, in a pantheon of demigods, warlike female figures and fabulous animals, the complexity of the blending of cultures and the incessant power struggles of civilizations.
Born in Calcutta in 1963, Rina Banerjee left India with her family for England and then the United States in the 1960s. Trained as an engineer, she obtained a Master of Fine Arts from Yale University in 1995 and settled in New York, maintaining a close relationship with her native country through regular visits to Asia.
Rina Banerjee’s singular experience informs an original, syncretic body of work that blends mythologies and religions, anthropology and fairy tales, exoticism and mass tourism. Challenging the order of the world in an explosion of imagination and materials, this delicate yet menacing work gives rise to beings in mutation,
sometimes monstrous creatures, metaphors for a world in perpetual becoming.
Following the Chu Teh-Chun and Hung-Chih Peng exhibitions (summer 2009), then Rashid Rana and Chen Zhen (summer-autumn 2010), “Chimères de l’Inde et de l’Occident” continues the Musée Guimet’s ambitious commitment to its scientific and cultural project “La Fabrique contemporaine de l’art en Asie”, at the crossroads between ancient heritage and contemporary creation.
Simultaneously with her exhibition at the Musée Guimet, Rina Banerjee will be showing her most recent works from May 22 at Galerie Nathalie Obadia, which has represented the artist since 2005.
Cette publication est également disponible en : Français (French)
