The Brooklyn Rail

The following is a conversation between artist Rina Banerjee and Grace Yasumura, an assistant curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), on occasion of the exhibition The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture. Currently on view at SAAM through September 14, 2025, it includes Banerjee’s work.

Grace Yasumura: Deities have been a recurring theme in your work for decades. I wonder if we might start with you thinking through what the idea of gods and goddess means to you?

Rina Banerjee: The word “God” suggests that he cannot be female. The alternative and gendered term, “Goddess,” is not an equivalent but an extension of the original word. Mending, altering, modifying the word is a global preoccupation, an exercise in the crafting of a male-centric, male-dominant vision, one where power is invested in a male body synonymous with stability, safety, community, and of course the promise of a prosperous future. Contrary to modern feminist logics, Goddess imaginary landscapes do not create a powerful modeling device for women but in fact echo the male desire to control ideologies pertaining to fertility and creation. My work is invested in freeing the Goddess from the male gaze, freeing her from the sexualized and/or virginal representations that dominate the cultural imaginary. I see these efforts to constrain and control the representations of the Goddess as intimately tied to colonialism. Colonialism is predicated on, and enforced through, compliance with the binary role of Man as creator and family as natural, reproductive resource. Colonialist ideology legitimized masculine power over fertility, labor, the foreign, and the female. The colonization of India and Bangladesh was an enterprise in cultivating a submissive Asia, in tightening the West’s hold on women as secondary and even disposable providers of raw material to support the accumulation of wealth in the west.

Yasumura: I love the way your practice reconfigures histories erased and distorted by official archives. Could you speak a bit more about your relationship to these histories of empire and how this has shaped your understanding of the Goddess in your work?

Banerjee: The spirituality I grew up with is one which attempts to help or heal those traumatized by partition and the Bangladesh war, as well as still active regimes of colonialism, apartheid, slavery, femicide, and genocide. Healing is central to immigrant or diasporic identities. The violence of colonialism is based largely on a white, male supremacist world vision which derives its power from the fabrication of difference, a dehumanization of especially women, non-whites, and children. The result of this dehumanization program is the creation of communities whose members are alienated from each other as well as from other communities. To break this spell of alienation I deconstruct cultural traditions and make their elements into creatures anew which champion a vision of a hybridity, connectivity, non-hierarchy—creating a shared possible future.

Yasumura: Your work often brings together very disparate objects that carry rich lineages of cultural significance outside of colonial dispossession but also imply a circulation through the architectures of imperial violence. Your use of assemblage resists in very powerful ways an easy kind of assimilation into a particular aesthetic. The figures you create resist and subvert any idealized body in really interesting and subversive ways. I wonder if you might talk a bit more about the process of making your work.

Banerjee: Both the materials and the process are important in my creation of assemblages. Numerous ideas factor into developing the work. One idea I’m trying to convey is that identity itself can be considered a kind of assemblage, a collection of different past histories that you choose to inhabit as a person. This is especially true for women for whom, I think, the invention and the visibility that is absent in their histories requires another, deeper layer of search. Another force of inspiration is to resist the politics of identity in the eighties and nineties that championed clean authentic cultural representation. And so I had decided in graduate school that I did not want to be reduced to being only a South Asian artist. I wanted to embrace not only my experience of the latter, but also how it overlaps with the cultural realities of places like Africa, the Caribbean, East Asia, and, especially Tibet, Nepal, and China, as well as in oceanic art, given the proximity to Kolkata and my exposure to my birth place. I’m also always incorporating ideas drawn from my curiosity about the textile industry. It was this that really created the magnet that drew colonial interests to India and especially the dyeing and printing techniques developed by women, much of which has gone historically unrecognized.

But when I make figures, such as Sita, who is a mythological figure referenced as a woman surrounded by a circle of fire, I like to connect her story to those of goddesses more generally. In this case the goddess is being tested for her devotion to her husband as proven by her virginity. This trial, which she could not survive, is not dissimilar to that of women accused of witchcraft globally and is held out as an example of the behavior of the ideal woman who commits suttee upon the death of her husband—demonstrating devotion, strength by suicide. In many ways I’m rejecting the celebration of the deity goddess as currently understood or received in contemporary culture. I think there’s a growing invisibility of female deities in the West. Not many people know about Sita or Durga, another female deity commonly worshipped in Bengali culture. This is happening even as there is growing celebration of the male deities Krishna and Ganesh in both the East and West. There is, of course, Kali, goddess of death, celebrated by some feminists as the embodiment of female power. She is more and more received, however, as a monster, a monster woman, you know, sort of like a fatal attraction: the evil, heartless destroyer of men who lures, attracts, kills. Her awakened sexuality is a kind of madness. But originally, Kali was regarded as a deity who had more to do with property rights and protecting the land. She’s warlike, wearing a garland of heads, male heads bleeding beneath her. That is the threat. And her powers are understood as feminine powers. But it’s almost an intoxication with that idea rather than a vocabulary of human emotional strength or human power. And this feminine intoxication leads to an understanding of female power which is not only evil but mad—yes, a kind of madness. So, I reject that. I think it’s too monumental in the way we receive it. I think the powers of protection are so much from the heart as an impulse and a reflex. And it was originally considered like a maternal love, a maternal love for the land. Because the land creates food as women make food for their children through their bodies.