Anindita Banerjee
Welcome, Race, Wyndham Art Space, August 2016. Photo: Dr. Pratish Bandopadhyay
Time Travel, 2019. Photo: Aurobindo Banerjee
Anindita Banerjee, a twice uprooted Indian, is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, arts worker and researcher. She lives and works on the lands of the Wadawurrung people of the Kulin Nation. Her interests include cultural otherness, authentic identity and the sense of home. The memories of ritualistic ceremonies and mark-makings and her reconstruction of them informs her practice. Using gestural portrayals of hybrid rituals, she wonders where her place is as an immigrant to the unceded Indigenous lands of present day Australia.
Through her work, she tests the existence of cultural otherness and challenges the notion of fitting in to sociocultural spaces literally and metaphorically. She has exhibited at the Victoria Parliament Melbourne, Customs House Sydney, the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts and various other institutions and galleries. In 2019, her solo, Home and Away, was held at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kolkata. She was also part of an exhibition at the Palazzo Bembo Gallery in Venice in conjunction with the Venice Biennale 2019.
How did your journey as an artist begin?
I have been creative all my life and therefore it is difficult to pinpoint how it all began. However, if I was to assign a start date to my current stint as a creative I would think of September 2012 when with 20 seconds of insane courage, I gave up my day job to pursue my passion for the arts, full time.
How would you describe your practice?
My practice is predominantly interdisciplinary and often includes themes of post coloniality, migration, cultural otherness, authentic identity and the sense of home. The violent history and contested identity of the lands I live on baffles me and through my practice I often question my place here. I recreate rituals I have experienced while growing up in Kolkata and present them in places where they do not belong, almost creating a third space, thus highlighting themes of displacement and otherness. I believe that my role as an artist is to initiate difficult conversations. I do not intend to create a large splash but instead through subtle gestures I aim to keep the complex discourses around migration and belonging, active and meaningful.
What are you working on right now?
I am working towards a solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ballarat in August 2021. Ondormohol, as part of the Ballarat Foto Biennale, is set to open on the 14th of August. You can read about it all here.
What is your connection to Ballarat?
I live in Ballarat with my two kids, my husband and two dogs.
How would you describe the creative community in Ballarat?
I have recently started discovering the immense creative wealth this city holds. There is a strong, dynamic and ever evolving creative community of artists hidden away behind the facade of a sleepy, historic rural city. It's like a giant living organism that prefers to be camouflaged during normal times but passionately expresses happiness, compassion, anger, fatigue etc. whenever necessary!
Can you give us three words to sum up your inspiration?
Passion, Expression and Gratitude
To learn more about Anindita’s work check out the following links…
Artist Website - https://www.aninditabanerjee.com/
PhD Exhibition - https://www.homeandaway-aninditabanerjee.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/anindita_banerjee_dita/
Images above:
(L) Installing Settle for Home and Away, Feb 2019. Photo: Melissa Smith
(Centre) Ondormohol, 2021. Photo: Anindita Banerjee
(R) Bodhu Boron, Hatched 2017, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts Photo: Anindita Banerjee
