Clouds of women, who remained in their villages, in empty homes, empty lands, empty kin, and people’s migration

Rina Banerjee is best known for sculptures and installations typically made from materials sourced throughout the world, and mixed-media ink drawings on paper. Both practices reflect her transnational background and her mastery of materials and image-making to examine the complexities of twenty-first-century globalism. In “Clouds of women, who remained . . .”, Banerjee presents a world that is both fluid and ambiguous. Female figures are dislocated, detached, and in a state of transformation, as the artist spins stories of splintered experiences of identity, tradition, and culture from the perspective of a woman of color… “I think of identity,” Banerjee has said, “as inherently foreign, of heritage as something that leaks away from the concept of home—as happens when one first migrates.” (“how the light gets in,” curated by Andrea Inselmann and presented at the Johnson Museum September 7-December 8, 2019)