Ranu Mukherjee: diagonal roots

Descolonización / DOSSIER 

Carolina Magis Weinberg  Abril de 2021

The banian is a tree that grows from the top to the bottom —birds deposit its seed in other trees’ trunks. The baninan invades the host tree, slowly encroaching upon it, taking its water and sunlight, until it overtakes it, wraps itself around it and suffocates it. In 1857, colonial British soldiers executed revolutionary leader Amar Shahid Bandhu Singh by hanging him from a sacred banian in Uttar Pradesh, in north India. When Singh died, the tree started bleeding. Thousands of people were assassinated in this infamous vertical form. Like these bodies, the roots also point down, towards the earth. After attaining its independence, India adopted the banian tree —the walking tree— as its national emblem.

Balancing between the natural and the cultural, Ranu Mukherjee’s work embodies that multiplying banian —at the same time seed, tree, and forest. Mukherjee explores the synchronicity of all her identities, that complex and continuous question at the root of contemporary decolonial matters. The answer is elusive, with layers of meaning that add up, one transforming the other, constituting a hybrid subject where there are no clear limits between temporalities and spatialities fluctuating in a constant encounter; a way of being in the world between question marks.

In Mukherjee’s work, paintings, animations (“hybrid films” as she calls them), and installations operate as meeting points through layers, materials, pigments, and textiles; her colors as contexts, places, times, and histories. The artist finds herself in a diagonal: that line which is neither vertical nor horizontal, neither weft nor warp. The body that is not only human but also tree and (why not) also extinct bird carrier of seeds, that now can only fly again through the layers of a painting. To dissolve into fragments, to disassemble, to unweave, and then turn into image. To remain in the intersection: hold, stay, grasp that intricate identity without letting go. Daughters braid their mothers’ hair, and then they braid themselves to trees and become mosaic-birds with infinite wings (infinite feathered creatures).

cut on the bias, 2020. Pigment, Cristalina, UV inkjet print and silk and cotton sari fabric on linen 72 x 42 inches

crowded dreams or how the dead speak, 2020. Pigment, UV inkjet print, silk and cotton sari fabric and alpaca yarn on linen 72 x 96 inches

hold, 2020. Pigment, UV inkjet print, silk and cotton sari fabric on linen, 16 x 16 inches