Rina Banerjee
Shareena, she chose, lost all her noodles explorer of better beauty in other people poodles. Caught hair in parts like runaway wigs and easter egg washed head with in and ribbons redfooled nature and her suiter to read her as different (2023).
Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin
Marking the 20th anniversary of the Espaces Louis Vuitton and the 10th anniversary of the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s Hors-les-murs programme, Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo presents an exhibition devoted to the work of South Asian diaspora artist Rina Banerjee, who transforms a wide range of found objects into mystical female sculptures and complex phantasmagorical installations. This exhibition is part of the Hors-les-murs programme, showcasing holdings of the Collection at the Espaces Louis Vuitton in Tokyo, Munich, Venice, Beijing, Seoul and Osaka, thereby embodying the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s mission to mount international projects and reach a broader global audience.
In her artworks, Rina Banerjee uses elements that reflect cultural and material residues of colonialism, textiles, ostrich eggs, feathers, and glass chandeliers, as well as everyday domestic items such as cotton threads and coconut powders, many of which were originally produced in the Global South (“the tropical zone,” per Banerjee). Her paintings are inspired by historic Indian miniature paintings, Chinese silk paintings, and Aztec drawings. Working in the liminal space between abstraction and representation, Banerjee resists the colonial gaze while creating works of exceptional visual beauty from unexpected hybrid materials. Her works, while critiquing various social divides and injustices, resist the colonial gaze, yet always contain humour. Banerjee says, "The viewer is both pleasured by the exotic object and simultaneously perplexed by its assertion." Each work has an extensive and poetic narrative as a title, which constitutes a part of her artistic work.
Over nearly three decades of artistic practice, Banerjee has explored critical issues of colonialism, migration, identity, international travel and trade, climate change, labour, exoticism, ornament, and the tension between tradition and modernity. Adopting a postcolonial feminist approach, she creates feminine figures of diverse sizes, shapes, and colours “invested in freeing the Goddess from the male gaze, freeing her from the sexualized […] representations that dominate the cultural imaginary.”
In this exhibition entitled You made me leave my happy home to become someone else anew, in diasporas without origin to be related again this is living and in this waits the joy of one earthly place, hope of eternal intimacy. Intimate in Nature., Banerjee’s selection of nineteen works, ranging from installations to sculptures and paintings, nuances the themes of international travel and the legacies of colonialism. The exhibition is conceived around In an unnatural storm a world fertile, fragile and desirous, polluted with excess pollination… (2008), a monumental installation about the wonder and precarity of adventurous international travel inspired by French author Jules Verne’s novel, Around the World in Eighty Days, from the Collection, presented for the first time by the Fondation Louis Vuitton. The work is representative of her practice in its conceptual, structural (i.e., a dome hanging from the ceiling, with a cascade of objects below), and formal (i.e., colour and shape) characteristics. Together with her recent installation Black Noodles (2023) that deals with the international trade of human hair and its political environment, the work sets a conceptual and formal tone for this exhibition.
In her works, including a new series of paintings made in 2025, the artist, with her extensive knowledge of pre-1900 Indian art, integrates South Asian materials, motifs, and iconographies to create female figures that often echo Hindu goddesses. Banerjee’s art speaks to the multifaceted, fluid, and transnational nature of the “self,” and explores her own identity as an immigrant who moved across different continents and at different points of life and in time.
About the Fondation Louis Vuitton
The Fondation Louis Vuitton serves the public interest and is exclusively dedicated to contemporary art and artists, as well as 20th-century works to which their inspirations can be traced. The Collection and the exhibitions it organises seek to engage a broad public. The magnificent building created by the Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry, and already recognized as an emblematic example of 21st-century architecture, constitutes the Fondation’s seminal artistic statement. Since its opening in October 2014, the Fondation has welcomed more than eleven million visitors from France and around the world.
The Fondation Louis Vuitton commits to engage in international initiatives, both at the Fondation and in partnership with public and private institutions, such as the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage Museum in Saint-Petersburg (Icons of Modern Art The Shchukin Collection in 2016 and The Morozov Collection in 2021), the MoMA in New York (Being Modern: MoMA in Paris), the Courtauld Institute of Art in London (The Courtauld Collection. A Vision for Impressionism), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art (Joan Mitchell Retrospective) among others. The Fondation also developed a specific “Hors-les-murs” programme taking place within the Espaces Louis Vuitton in Tokyo, Munich, Venice, Beijing, Seoul and Osaka, presenting exhibitions of artworks from the Collection. These exhibitions are open to the public free of charge.
