Ranu Mukherjee Has Been Very Busy
“I am trying to do this really basic job of a painter, which is to make images that express something about the present.”
— Ranu Mukherjee
While many of us have been wondering what to do, Ranu Mukherjee has been very busy in 2020. She has been painting and studying and painting and listening and painting and writing and painting some more. This series of mixed media paintings is a result of all that work, and it represents the full constellation of Ranu’s concerns: ecology, motherhood, and biodiversity; the human body and labor; modernity, climate change, and sacred cultures; the impoverishment of the imagination and the promise of unimagined utopias; feminist futurism and the strength of listening.
Because Ranu’s interests overlap and push one another forward, like surging waves swirling toward the shore, she presents them in layers of fabric and pigment and along intersecting narrative lines. She weaves her interests and influences together on the canvas. That means that these ten paintings lead the eye and the mind in a series of threads from the intimacy of a moment shared between a mother and a daughter to a renewed understanding of ecology, from accounts of children attempting to cross the US-Mexico border to a thousand-year-old mythological Indian figure, from ancient and immovable Banyan trees to train compartments and fleeting moments of passage. In these works, Ranu incorporates materials that speak with and interrupt one another, creating a creolized visual language. Something is happening at every moment and everything connects and mixes throughout.
“I work by trying to reach backward and forward in time and combine multiple forces or influences when I make a picture.”
As one looks deeper and further into Ranu’s canvases, connections light up and hidden associations emerge. For Ranu, abstract is a verb. It is an action she undertakes while painting rather than a word she uses to describe her work. She abstracts reality on the canvas, so her paintings are as much experienced as they are looked at. In cut on the bias, for example, we see a girl braiding her mother’s hair. It is an everyday activity endlessly repeated by mothers and daughters across cultures and throughout history. Nothing else is happening here. These women are alone and performing a simple, domestic task.
But something else is happening here. These women are isolated in time and space, but they are not alone. There is a Banyan tree growing behind them, or around them. They are either growing into it or emerging from it. Banyan trees are sacred in India, and they are also where India’s cultural and ecological histories intersect, tragically so: In order both to punish infractions and to undermine indigenous religious beliefs and practices, British colonialists used to hang Indian revolutionaries in Banyan trees. And these women are sitting by one, braiding hair. Their activity is as primordial as the tree, and they undertake it with the quiet intensity of a sacred ritual. In this composition, the simple act of a girl in glasses braiding her mother’s hair is made sacred, and the simplicity of sacred action is revealed.
“We always think when we see an image that we know what we are looking at, so I want there to be this productive doubt about what we are seeing and what dimension it lives in.”
Ranu uses sari fabric—produced through manual labor and conventionally used to cover the body—to abstract the body in cut on the bias and its sister piece, prop roots, braids, and ellipses. These women’s hands and arms are fabricated from saris. Made from the very things they might make, they are products of their own labor. To cut such fabric “on the bias” is to cut across it diagonally, which actually makes it stretchier, more forgiving, and more fluid. As the connections between the Banyan and the sacred and the sari and the body twist together and coalesce in the presence of these women on the canvas, one begins to imagine motherhood itself as a kind of fabric, cut on the bias for strength and flexibility and draped to cover and protect. One gains the sense that motherhood is not merely a genealogical relationship. It is also an ecological one.
Ranu includes many different species of birds in her compositions. The diversity is astonishing. Birds are everywhere, roosting and gathering and singing in Banyan trees. As different as each of these birds is from the others, however, they all have one thing in common: They have gone extinct. They are bi-products of the Anthropocene era, evidence of humans’ impoverishment of their own biosphere.
“The birds are all extinct species. So I was thinking about how the birds might speak to us, or what they might want to say. And I think that if I keep painting them over and over again that they might start to speak.”
“When I was starting to make this work I was thinking about this idea of motherhood as a form of futurism.”
When we accept this invitation, looking and listening deeper into these works, utopian possibilities arise before us. In futurism, for example, set against a background of stars and Banyan roots, a pregnant woman hovers, suspended in space. In this inverted abstraction of reality, the tree’s roots grow up the canvas. The figure of the woman is almost indistinguishable from the tree and the cosmic background. She becomes part of both, existing within cosmological time and expressing the will to live and grow. In this painting, the future is embryonically present. This painting is a statement of the present moment, full of possibility, and a symbol of strength. It suggests that everything we need to find our way through the frightening contingencies of climate crisis and species extinction is already given to us. We carry the things we need within us.
Attention ought to be drawn to the dimensions of these paintings: The canvases are roughly the size of adult human beings. Some of them are so intimate as to be individual portraits; others have room enough to contain multitudes. This scale allows viewers to recognize themselves on the canvas and within the world. It also reflects Ranu’s commitment to the human person and human potentialities, even as it interrogates human activity in the natural world.
As in the perspective one gains through the window of a moving train, in which a particular scene is fully realized even as it seems to flow past us and into the next one, Ranu’s paintings abstract the present moment and capture a history of the future. The narrative threads that weave through and emerge within her work are versions of our own moving, shifting, and ever-emerging stories. These nine paintings lend hope, context, and imagination to that emergence. Ranu paints us as we are at the present moment. At the same time, she reminds us of where we have come from and where we might be going.
“ I want the paintings to perform, as opposed to represent.”
