Artist – Ranu Mukherjee
Home and the World, 2015
Gallery Wendi Norris
161 Jessie Street
San Francisco 94105
USA
T: 415.346.7812
E: info@gallerywendinorris.com
W: www.gallerywendinorris.com
In Satyajit Ray’s 1984 cinematic adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore’s 1916 novel Ghare Baire (“The Home and the World”), the female protagonist passes through a corridor emerging from domestic chambers, marking her entry into the outside world and into the environs of a nascent post-colonial India. As she moves the film turns from black and white to color.
Home and the World, the first hybrid film in a new body of work by Ranu Mukherjee, draws parallels between the history represented in Ray’s film and the present/future moment. It replays the female ‘coming out’ in a contemporary sense, using the corridor image as a structural representation of (female) bodies situated within global urban growth. Composed around the breakdown of the colonial corridor architecture itself, the video reveals perpetual transformation—a sense of nature overtaking, falling panes of glass and a kind of ecstatic motion. Despite the sense of collapse, silhouetted figures continue to move forward. They travel amidst a swirl of debris, the ephemera of everyday attention to detail and sustenance, moving about in the air like dust.
As with Mukherjee’s previous hybrid films, Home and the World is composed of photographic, painted and digital source material. There is a slow and deliberate sense of rhythm, built through overlaying but distinct kinds of motion—figures moving forward, gently crumbling architecture, animals and reeling miscellany.
San Francisco-based Mukherjee photographed and assembled the video in Mumbai.