Debjani Banerjee’s comment: is he Henry hoover – or a Hindu god? | | Art

Tthe stories we are told shape the world we live in. If your father forced you to watch all 94 episodes of a based on the telecast of the Mahabharatawhen it was shown on the BBC, as Debjani Banerjee did, it’s easy to imagine that your family’s Henry Hoover would resemble Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu god with a similarly tall trunk. My Irish mother meant that I could always hear bans on my bedroom window, as if she had brought them to England with her. In a sense, he did. Thus, Banerjee’s iconic sculpture of a washing machine as the god of new beginnings, which is at the center of this clever and moving exhibition, evokes ideas created by 1980s British suburbia and ancient Bengali traditions.

Sitting on the colorful carpet line, Henry-Ganesha attracts the attention of anyone who grows up with more than one culture. But this work also includes an additional point: that each generation must change the traditions it has adopted to adapt to the current situation in order for the traditions to continue to exist. Banerjee’s artwork draws on her Bengali heritage as a way to ask questions that are relatable to anyone living in Britain today: how do we preserve the values ​​that bind us together when things begin to fade? How do we impart knowledge to our children? What should we have in this rapidly changing future, and what should we leave behind?

The various influences on the artist’s mind are brought together in a film that plays in a “music room” furnished with divans and pillows. It combines images from two TV versions of the Mahabharata; a picture of the artist’s mother wearing a saree and carrying a glorious Pepsi can on the desolate hills of Britain (an image reproduced elsewhere as a technicolor cloth incongruously); clips from the CBeebies cartoon featuring the iconic wheel of cheese (called Cheese), which the artist watched every morning with his daughter; and many other things besides. Sent on different levels to Ganesha, the artist’s mother and the artist’s daughter, the film falls between the past and the present, the fascinating and the strange, the familiar and the strange (which side divides the elephant-headed God and the block of cheese in the fall of the pigtail depends on where you look).

Banerjee’s surreal juxtapositions don’t preclude high culture, in the sense of relegating it to daytime television. Instead, they help reshape everyday life, bringing Indian gods into the British world of anthropomorphic vacuum cleaners and creepy carpets. So it makes sense that the show would feature the twin shrines of the demon Putana, who haunted young Banerjee’s dreams after the Mahabharata was approved. sessions, and Cheese, who played a similar role in the relationship between the artist and his daughter. This conflict between domesticity and myth insists that culture is the culture of all people, which is made important not because of the respect of fiction but because of the connection that begins between people.

This commitment to culture as a community is most evident in the patchwork tapestry that runs along the longest wall of the exhibition. Paintings of five female characters from the Mahabharata, and decorated with hangings, silks, and fluttering feathers, were created by the artist as part of a meeting with local people for an exhibition in Glasgow. A testament to the work of collective art, the irreverence of the work of storytelling traditions provides another reminder that traditions live on through retelling. Cultures are preserved in museums only after they die; The living survive in the stories you tell your children, the pictures you make to decorate your living room, the television you watch with your family, the fabrics you sew with your neighbors.

In the music room, two songs play around: one, for the film, composed by a great Bengali poet. Rabindranath Tagore; the other invokes the goddess Kali. All sung by the artist’s sister, Mita Pujaraand they are the beating heart of the show. In this way, the show is similar to the movie Satyajit Ray where it takes its title. In his famous setting, the dancer plays the last in a line of wealthy landowners whose patronage allowed Bengali art to flourish. After the play, he is spooked when all the lights in his room are playing music: he realizes that the end of his life is near and the time of Bengali culture that it represents. But his servant rushes to the window and pulls back the curtains to let light into the room: it is morning, he says, and the sun will continue to rise. The scene is included in Banerjee’s film, alongside a video of the actress dancing in her music room.