This event was recorded on Nov. 16, 2022 at Anderson Ranch Arts Center during the 2022 Fall Lecture Series, in partnership with Aspen Public Radio.
Ranu Mukherjee makes hybrid work in painting, moving image, and installation to build new imaginative capacities. Her work is guided by the forces of ecology and non-human agency, diaspora and migration, motherhood, and transnational feminisms. The genre of speculative fiction has been critical in Mukherjee’s artistic development, as a guide to considering otherness (human and otherwise) in relation to somatic experience, cultural construction and power. Her work often takes form In layered tableaux and uses various approaches to awaken deep connections with nature and multi-dimensional experience. In her recent project ‘Ensemble for Non Linear Time’, she collaborates with choreographer Hope Mohr and an ensemble cast to produce workshops, performances and film installations that contemplate imaginary forests as protagonists.
Mukherjee has exhibited nationally and internationally, including commissioned projects for the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, de Young Museum, Karachi Biennale 2019, Los Angeles County Museum of Contemporary Art, San Francisco Arts Commission, San Jose Museum of Art, Singapore Biennial 2022 and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Recent awards include a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2020), a Lucas Visual Arts Fellowship at Montalvo Arts Center (2019-2022) and residencies at 18th Street Arts Center, Los Angeles and 836M San Francisco. Her work is in the collections of Asian Art Museum, De Young Museum, The Avery, Robert D. Bielecki Foundation, Kadist Foundation, JP Morgan, Oakland Museum of California and the San Jose Museum of Art. She is represented by Gallery Wendi Norris who published her first monograph Shadowtime in 2021. She is co-founder of media collective 0rphan drift and Chair of Film at California College of the Arts. Her most recent solo exhibition Dear Future is on view at 18th Street Arts Center’s Propeller GalleryLos Angeles through March 5, 2023.