Image Credit - San Jose Museum of Art
Rina Banerjee is well known for her enormous sculptures and installations composed of materials from all over the world. Her work focuses on the fragmented identities, traditions, and cultures that are common in diasporic societies. Banerjee's artwork promotes diversity on a material level by utilising a range of materials, such as African tribal jewellery, vibrant feathers, light bulbs, and Murano glass. These sensuous assemblages, which thrive on tensions between visual cultures and pose issues with exoticism, cultural appropriation, globalisation, and feminism, show themselves as both familiar and foreign at the same time.
Her larger body of work, which questions contemporary nationalist political ideologies, suggests that identity is multifaceted and not solely focused on a person's culture of origin or gender but also on self-identification. The fragmented figures, wild use of colour, and symbolic materials that characterise Banerjee's constantly developing work all reflect these open-ended and liberating concepts of the "self." Banerjee's works continuously challenge modern approaches to artistic creation and social involvement, which are paired with their provocative and poetic titles.
The San José Museum of Art and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts collaborated to co-organize Rina Banerjee's first solo retrospective, Make Me a Summary of the World, which featured 60 sculptures, paintings, and videos. Banerjee has also participated in 14 biennial exhibitions globally, including the 57th Venice Biennale, the Yokohama Triennale, and the Kochi Biennial. Many public and private collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Center Pompidou, the Foundation Louis Vuitton, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Center for Creative Photography, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum, have showcased Rina Banerjee in their collection.