Latest Issue

No. 36 Winter 2024/2025 20.00

Beasts of Beauty

Rina Banerjee

Visual Essay
No. 26 •
Beasts of Beauty

‘I dream of this willingness to close the gaps between cultures, communities, and places. I think of identity as inherently foreign; of heritage as something that leaks away from the concept of home – as happens when one first migrates.’ Rina Banerjee (b. 1963) was born in Kolkata, India, and grew up in London and New York City, where she still lives and works.

Migration defines her personal history, as well as her work: her materials are gathered from all over the world and her visual language is influenced by an array of cultural sources. The titles of her works, as seen on the following pages, read like poems and draw the viewer into her delicate, dreamlike worlds – with hybrid figures floating in an otherworldly universe. The titles are often over fifty words in length, and have idiosyncratic spellings.

Banerjee: ‘I’m aware that I speak the English language because I am Indian, and that it’s not mine, so I like toying with it, making it bend, stretch, reach.’ The artist likes to play with the idea that we have the ability to make our own histories, ‘that we can constantly edit and reshape it to suit to our own discovery of ourselves.’

Browse throught the full visual essay
in See All This #26

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