LECTURE: Ranu Mukherjee | Maine College of Art Visiting Artist

Nov 29 @ 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm, 522 Congress Street, Portland

Making Migration Visible: Traces, Tracks & Pathways featured artist Ranu Mukherjee will talk about her practice and work in the exhibition at MECA’s ICA. The talk will be hosted in MECA’s Osher Hall.

Ranu Mukherjee makes bodies of work and large scale installations by combining drawing, painting and print on fabric or paper alongside video, animation and choreography. Her work is marked by a deliberate use of saturated color, layering or collision of time frames, fragmentation and bodily materiality. Her art evokes questions of visibility and abstraction, intensified by the algorithmic distribution of news images and information. In recent projects, she explores the present as a confluence of tension between colonial legacy and indigenous power, and ways that colonial subjects and objects can speak to the future. Her elemental treatment of landscape embodies the force of otherness; of the hybrid, the diasporic and the speculative.

Mukherjee’s recent solo exhibitions and projects include A Bright Stage, De Young Museum (2018), Succession, for Be Not Still:living in Uncertain Times, Di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art (2018), Shadowtime, Gallery Wendi Norris (2017), Shivery Proof, Pennsylvania College of Art and Design (2017),  Extracted, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (2016), Phantasmagoric, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (2016) Phantasmagoria, Tarble Arts Center (2017) and Telling Fortunes, San Jose Museum of Art (2012). Her work has been included in many national and international group exhibitions at venues including 1A Space Hong Kong, Arizona State University Art Museum, Aggregate Space Gallery, Oakland, Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai, Dana Galleries, Rutgers University, Gallery Espace, New Delhi, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Vincent Price Museum, Los Angeles and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco.

Mukherjee earned an MA from Royal College of Art, London and a BFA from Massachusetts  College of Art, Boston. She was co-founder of 0rphan drift, a collaborative media artist which emerged in London in the 1990’s. Their work has recently been shown in Matter Fictions at the Berardo Museum, Lisbon, Unruly City at Dold Projects, Sankt Georgen, Germany and Eat Code and Die at Lomex Gallery, NY. Ranu received a 2009 Kala Institute Fellowship and artist residencies at 18th Street Arts Complex, Los Angeles,  Space 118, Mumbai and the De-Young Museum, San Francisco. Her work is in the collections of the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, Robert D. Bielecki Foundation, NY, Kadist Foundation, NY and Paris, JP Morgan Collection , New York, Oakland Museum of California and the San Jose Museum of Art. She is represented by Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco.