Rina Banerjee - You made me leave home...
- Date
- From 19.03.2026 to 13.09.2026
- Place
-
Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo
-
Omotesando Bldg 7F 5-7-5 Jingumae Shibuya-ku
-
Tokyo 150-0001
- Phone
-
+81 3 3515 0855
SELECTED WORK FROM THE COLLECTION
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.
PORTRAIT OF RINA BANERJEE AT ESPACE LOUIS VUITTON TOKYO, 2026
Crédit photographique : © Fondation Louis Vuitton / Jeremie Souteyrat
n 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.”
A woman must keep moving, in fight to find height, battle stied, won alone, break no bones, carry her young...while after pushing mountain ache like drystone. 2022
Acrylic, ink on paper 76.2 × 57.2 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin
In an unnatural storm a world fertile, fragile and desirous, polluted with excess pollination, hungry to seize an untidy commerce also gave an unknowable size to some mongrel possessions, excreted a promiscuous heritage, sprayed her modern love, breathed deeper than any one place arching her back threw new empire, religion, bathed in unseasonable hope to alter what could not be warm 2008
Steel dome, conversation chair piece made of wood, cotton, shells, wooden altars, glass amber medicine vials, wire chandelier, glass chandelier, ostrich eggs, dry and hollow gourds, paper and plastic globes, plastic eggs, amber glass beads, white pigeon feather fans, grey pigeon feather grey, Chinese umbrellas, brass light fixtures, plastic and wooden miniature animal figurines, black ceramic horns 700 × 400 × 400 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris Photo credits: Jérémie Souteyrat / Louis Vuitton
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 2026, 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.
Rina Banerjee
Rina Banerjee was born in 1963 in Kolkata, India. She lives and works in New York City (USA). She hails from multiple cultures within India and emigrated to the United Kingdom (London and Manchester) before her family moved to the United States (Queens, New York City) when she was seven years old.
Before art-making, encouraged by her parents, she studied polymer engineering at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland (Ohio, USA), an interdisciplinary field focused on designing, analysing, modifying, and processing polymer materials such as plastics, rubbers, fibres for diverse applications. As a result, her thought process and artwork demonstrate this unique training in engineering.
After receiving her Master of Fine Arts degree in painting and printmaking from Yale University (Connecticut, USA) in 1995, Banerjee came to be known first from her inclusion in the groundbreaking exhibition Out of India: Contemporary Art of the South Asian Diaspora at the Queens Museum of Art (USA,1997) and the 2000 Whitney Biennial (New York, USA). At the Yale School of Art (Connecticut, USA), she has served as a guest critic on numerous occasions, including the inaugural Post-Colonial Critic in 2022. For the past thirty years, she has consistently shown in both solo and thematic museum and gallery exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and most recently Asia. The Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo exhibition is her third solo exhibition in Japan after two exhibitions at Ota Fine Arts (2013-14 and 2017). Currently featured at the Yale Center for British Art (Connecticut, USA) with her large-scale installation titled Take me, take me, take me…to Palace of love (2013), she has had several survey exhibitions, including Make Me a Summary of the World (2018-2019) at the San Jose Museum of Art (California, USA) and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadephia (USA), and Rina Banerjee: Chimaeras of India and the West (2011) at the Musée Guimet in Paris (France).
Banerjee has also exhibited in numerous international biennials and triennials, including the 55th and 57th Venice Biennale (Italy), the Yokohama Triennale 2011 (Japan), the 3rd Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale (Japan), and the 5th Kochi Biennale (India). She has also been included in epoch-making thematic exhibitions at museums including the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, USA), the Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (New Delhi, India), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, USA), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, USA), among others. She is represented in numerous public and private collections internationally.
