RANU MUKHERJEE | ARTADIA AWARDEE
2023, San Francisco Bay Area
JURORS: Christine Koppes, Jennifer Inacio, Jordan Stein, Matilde Guidelli Guidi
“Mukherjee has an impressive command of various mediums, working in a hybrid of collage, painting, and film cohesively to tackle topics of colonization, climate, and time through compositions of plants, minerals, bodies, and objects – such as furniture made with exploited materials – that come together in a distinct visual landscape.” – Juror Christine Koppes, Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, ICA San Francisco.
Ranu Mukherjee’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the 18th Street Arts Center, Los Angeles, de Young Museum, San Francisco; the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design; the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco ; the Tarble Art Center, Charleston, IL and the San Jose Museum of Art, CA. Her most recent hybrid film installations have been presented by Natasha, Singapore Biennale 2022-2023, the 2019 Karachi Biennale and Los Angeles County Museum of Art and in numerous international group exhibitions. Awards and honors include a Pollock Krasner Grant (2020); Lucas Visual Arts Fellowship at Montalvo Arts Center (2019-2024); an 18th Street Arts Center Residency, Los Angeles (2022); Facebook Artist in Residence (2020); de Young Museum Artist Studio Program (2017); the Space 118 Residency, Mumbai (2014); and a Kala Fellowship Award and Residency, Berkeley (2009).
Ranu Mukherjee’s collage-based paintings and film installations cultivate ecological, somatic, feminist and multidimensional perspectives on time, energy and power emerging from ruptured colonial legacies. Working with pigment, digital pattern, sari cloth, choreography and animation, she brings together South Asian, European and American references and materials that mix, converse and interrupt one another to create creolized visual languages. Depictions of tree, plant, flower, mineral, human and animal bodies, as well as furniture, microphones and other industrial objects, come together in fields of luminescent color, reconfiguring relationships and picturing differently tuned worlds.