Rina Banerjee In Conversation: “exposer, migration, contagion and isolation…”

Exposer, Migration, Contagion and Isolation: Artist Rina Banerjee In Conversation will feature Jodi Throckmorton Curator of Contemporary Art Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), in Philadelphia, discussing curating Rina Banerjee’s touring retrospective “Make Me a Summary of the World” with the artist, Rina Banerjee.

Their conversation will feature the following motifs:

* Being in the world when viewing it from the isolation of an American Culture.

* Exposure to the world, trials of authenticity in Asian art and its diasporic landscape.

* Foraging materials and objects from elsewhere, eBay, Etsy and the internet bazaar

*The orientalist, orientalism and the artist as hero, genius explorer.

Sotheby's Institute is delighted to be presenting this event, which is part of the series Curating the Contemporary in Asia: Regions, Tradition and the Now, in partnership with Singapore Art Week 2021. In these talks, academics, curators and artists from across the region and its diasporas will come together to discuss the relationship between art, tradition and the contemporary in Asia.

Lecture Date And Fees

Friday, 5 Feb 2021

This event starts at 5.30pm (Singapore); 3.00pm (India); 2.30pm (Pakistan); 9.30am (London). Please note this event will be recorded, for the benefit of people who miss the live broadcast.

Price: £45

Speakers

Rina Banerjee lives and works in New York City. She was born in Kolkata, India, lived briefly in Manchester and London before arriving to Queens, New York. Although Banerjee has been living in United States for 50 years, she still draws the perception that she is foreign and other.

Drawing on her multinational background and personal history as a immigrant, Banerjee’s work focuses on ethnicity, race, and migration and American Diasporic histories. The artist’s sculptures feature a wide range of globally sourced materials, textiles, colonial/historical and domestic objects while her drawings are inspired by Indian miniature and Chinese silk paintings and Aztec drawings. In 2018 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the San José Museum of Art co-organized the artist’s first solo retrospective Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World featuring 60 works of sculptures, paintings, and video. The retrospective’s North American tour includes exhibitions at the San Jose Museum of Art, Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles ending at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville Tennessee in 2020.

Banerjee has exhibited internationally, spanning 14 biennials worldwide like 57 Venice Biennial, Yokohama Triennale, and Kochi Biennial. The artist’s works are included in many private and public collections such as the Foundation Louis Vuitton, Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, San Jose Museum of Art, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum.

Banerjee has returned to teaching in 2020, as a critic for the Yale School of Art Graduate Program.

Jodi Throckmorton is Curator of Contemporary Art Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). Throckmorton joined PAFA in fall of 2014. As PAFA’s Contemporary Curator, Throckmorton oversees PAFA’s contemporary art exhibitions and acquisitions. Throckmorton came to PAFA from the Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University, Kansas, where she served as Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. Prior to that, Throckmorton was the Associate Curator at the San Jose Museum of Art. She holds an MA in Museum Studies from San Francisco State University, and a BA in Art History and French from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Throckmorton co-organized, with former PAFA Director Harry Philbrick, Dive Deep: Eric Fischl and the Process of Painting, which was on exhibit at PAFA and the San Jose Museum of Art (2012-13). Other current and prior projects of Throckmorton’s include Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World (2018); Melt/Carve/Forge: Embodied Sculptures by Cassils (2017); Fernando Orellana: His Study of Life (2016); Postdate: Photography and Inherited History in India (2015); Bruce Conner: Somebody Else's Prints (2014); Questions from the Sky: New Work by Hung Liu (2013); Ranu Mukherjee: Telling Fortunes (2012); and This Kind of Bird Flies Backward: Paintings by Joan Brown (2011).

Hero image: Rina Banerjee, Viola, from New Orleans-ah, an African Woman, was the 19th century’s rescue worker, a global business goods raker, combed, tilled the land of Commerce, giving America a certain extra extra excess culture, to cultivate it, making home for aliens not registered, made business of the finer, finer, had occupations, darning thread not leisure with reason and with luster, in “peek a boo” racial disguises preoccupied in circulating commerce, entertaining white folks, pulling and punching holes in barriers, place that where was once barren, without them, white banks made of mustard and made friendly folks feel home, welcomed and married immigrants from far noted how they been also starved, fled from servitude and colonial dangers, ships like dungeons, pushing coal in termite wholes, churning fire, but always learning, folding, washing, welcomed as aliens. She wandering, hosting, raising children connected to new mobilities and most unusual these movements in Treme’, New Orleans was a incubating, enmeshed embedded in this silken cocoon when she land, she’s came to be parachute mender, landed those black immigrant peddlers from Hoogali network of new comers, 2017, Murano glass horns, Indian rake, seeds beads, steel, Yoruba African mask, oyster shells, cowrie shells, Charlotte dolls, polyester horse hair trim, Korean silks, Indian silks, vintage Kashmir shawls, French wire Ferris wheel, Congolese elbow bangles, colonial mirror scones, Japanese seed glass beads, sequins, threads, dimensions variable, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Museum Purchase, 2017.53 © Rina Banerjee, Image courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts/Barbara Katus

Related Events:

Sotheby's Institute is delighted to be presenting a series of events in partnership with Singapore Art Week 2021.

January 29: Curating Calligraphy: Contemporary Ink in Exhibition

February 5: Curating Regionalism in Southeast Asian Contemporary Art

February 12: Timely Traditions? South Asian Pasts & Presents

February 19: Artist Rina Banerjee In Conversation

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