Mixing Dusts

Mixing Dusts (Excerpt), 2017

Running time 8:39, Digital video installation, BD-R projection on glass with concrete base, edition of 5 + AP

As artist-in-residence at the de Young Museum, Ranu Mukherjee recorded pairs of participants rolling on the ground while hugging. In Mixing Dusts, footage of this intimate and difficult action is sequenced into a constructed space where the embracing bodies appear in motion on mutable and unsteady ground. Expressions of love are made incongruous by an underlying sense of apocalypse and uncertainty. Mukherjee replaces the epic art historical image of the kiss with an image of love that is tender, awkward and perhaps more grounded in common experience.