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September 2000 New York - Bose Pacia Modern presents
Antenna, an installation by
Rina Banerjee, an artist recently featured in this year's Whitney Biennial. Antenna will run from October 26 through November 30 at 508 W. 26th Street, 11th Floor. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 12-6pm and by appointment. An opening reception will be held Thursday, October 26 from 6-8pm; the public is invited.
Banerjee, a woman artist born in Calcutta and relocated to the United States, explores the personal, political, cultural and social effects of migration through her installation using the antenna as a metaphor. Antenna is a medium, a receptor, and transmitter where a complex world of disparate spaces is received and made fluent. As a constituent of the South Asian diaspora, Banerjee considers the positive mix of cultures and artifacts from which she draws inspiration but also the more pernicious effects of migration in this new millennium -- spiritual dislocation, racial, cultural and gender bias and the spread of communicable diseases such as AIDS. Sujata Moorti describes Banerjee's thematic focus as: "The resultant hybrid sensibility of belonging to two places and simultaneously of not belonging to either place."
Throughout Antenna, disturbing signals of other worlds, local, regional and global run together. Banerjee uses sculpture, installation, and conceptual art forms to illuminate the emerging space of the migrant. Craft, artifact and high Art draw upon each other in an entangled drama of cultural politics, representation, and origin, while the tenacious technologies of contamination and containment effortlessly separate them. An elusive improvisational space is created where desire, power, and mimicry are hurled out there in fluid transmission. Feelers, tentacles, wiry spokes of umbrellas pierce the gallery space while saran wrapped wings, delicate threads and medical dispensary trays float, compelling the viewer into a sensory place of transformation, displacement and renewal.
Rina Banerjee was born in Calcutta, India and emigrated to London England in 1966. Subsequently, she and her family moved to New York City. She received an MFA degree from Yale University. Ms. Banerjee was a recipient of the Norfolk-Yale Drawing award and Skowhegan School of Painting scholarship. She has been an active educator in Cultural Studies and Women's Studies in the Visual Arts, while teaching at Bucknell University, Penn State University and the University of Chicago. In addition, her work has been exhibited at the Bronx Museum of Art, the Queens Museum Art in New York City, and the Whitney Biennial, 2000. She resides and works in Brooklyn, New York.