National Museum of Asian Art Arthur M. Sackler Gallery
1050 Independence Ave., SW
Washington, DC
Drawing on her background as a scientist and experience as an immigrant, artist Rina Banerjee (b. 1963 in India, based in New York City) creates richly textured works that complicate the role of objects as representations of cultures. By juxtaposing organic and plastic objects—such as combining ornate textiles and animal forms with tourist souvenirs—she concocts fairytale worlds that are both enticing and subtly menacing.
Rina Banerjee created her latest site-specific sculptural assemblage, A world lost. Drawing inspiration from major river systems in Asia to create a fanciful-yet-sinister-world of collected objects, the installation touches on themes of migration and transformation. It's lengthy title conveys the sense of a long journey: A world Lost: after the original island, single land mass fractured, after populations migrated, after pollution revealed itself and as cultural locations once separated merged, after the splitting of Adam and Eve, of race black and white, of culture East and West, after animals diminished, after the seas’ corals did exterminate, after this and at last imagine water evaporated...this after Columbus found it we lost it imagine this.
