previous image | Contemporary Art and Identity | next image

Rina Banerjee
Resisting Rest, 1999

Foam, incense sticks, dry pigment,
coiled chiffon, wrought iron bed

Rina Banerjee

 

What is the "nature of illness"?
In a time where the electronic age has dissolved boundaries created by nations, the private transgresses the public in an altered state of aggression. An examination of mobility manifested reaches the most intimate of places to expose the never still self. Migration in complete contradiction to the act is displacement, exile and associated with punishment and discipline, at least on a mythological level. Migration associated with disease has evolved parallel dialogues that attempt to disseminate control over the foreign body. A compulsive act of separation is entertained both in order to concretely preserve and illuminate the past. Identity politics in the discussion of displacement struggles to normalize hybridity into a "healthier" more familiar place of rest.

Colonial medicine confronted with the vast array of different people and place upon conquest and occupation furthered its capitalistic venture. We have inherited from Colonial medicine. The notion of "other" as a resistant and unhealthy unit, which need ready assimilation legitimizing the most aggressive methods, was a phenomena that predates contemporary global imperialism. These pieces enact the three spaces of interrogation. Marriage, Sexuality and the Intellect.

 

Rina Banerjee received her Fine Art training at Yale University where she acquired an MFA degree. Ms. Banerjee was a recipient of the Norfolk-Yale Drawing award and Skowhegan School of Painting scholarship. Ms. Banerjee has been an active educator in the areas of 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 and the Queens Museum Art in New York City. In this year Ms. Banerjee will exhibited her work in the Whitney Biennial 2000, Brent Sikkema, Debs&Co. Presently she lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.



previous image | Contemporary Art and Identity | next image