Rina Banerjee’s 2017 sculpture “Viola, from New Orleans…” is named after Viola Ida Lewis, a black woman from the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans who, in 1906, married Joseph Abedin, a Bengali Muslim merchant . A skeletal assembly of ready-to-use objects, the sculpture both imitates and deforms the body of a woman. His materials are found throughout Banerjee’s sculptural practice: a Yoruba mask, steel wires, cowries, Indian silks, sequins, rakes and tangled threads.

The title of the book is actually much longer. He continues: “an African woman, was the 19th century helper, a rack of global business goods, combed, plowed the land of trade, giving America some extra extra culture…”, and from there . Here we begin to glean parts of Viola’s story, and by extension, Joseph’s – he was a Bengali sailor who most likely jumped from a British company ship due to harsh working conditions. After his marriage, led a small import business with his wife, selling “exotic” trinkets and oriental objects. Their story illustrates the complexities of mobility, empire and capitalism.

In a event held in April at Syracuse University (where Banerjee was recently visiting professor), Gayatri Spivak repeated the artist’s own words of intent, “To make visible what cannot be explained by the Orient/ West”. This practice often revolves around narratives of goods – and people – traveling, thereby obscuring ideologically constructed notions of East and West. Banerjee and Spivak, a Columbia University professor widely recognized for her contributions to postcolonial theory, were born in Calcutta; according to Spivak, they are both considered “visible diasporics” and represent “upper-class metropolitan Bengalis” who arrived in the United States in the second half of the 20th century. For Spivak, Banerjee’s work complicates two frames: “the diasporic” – which has “no authenticity” according to Spivak – and the “idea of ​​the West”, likewise “totally invented”.

Spivak describes Viola’s story as “marked by class,” alluding to the class position in colonial Bengal that led to Joseph Abedin’s migration and the couple’s occupation of New Orleans. But she also notes, “It is not necessary for the viewer to have the information.” A glance at “Viola”, the physical sculpture, does not necessitate a discussion of an interracial marriage in the American South at the turn of the 20th century. Nevertheless, through his titles and his explanatory practice, Banerjee insists on associating his creations with both history and an imaginary narrative. From there, we can begin to follow the deeper threads of power, cultural reproduction, and imperial afterlife in his work.

These concepts are currently evident in black noodles at the Perrotin Gallery, an exhibition featuring a range of new drawings and sculptures by Banerjee (“Viola” is not in the exhibition). black noodles marks the artist’s first major solo exhibition in New York, the city of his childhood and current home.

Earlier this month, Banerjee walked me through the show, talking about his experiences in the art world. It had been six years since his first showcase at the Venice Biennale, 16 years since his very first solo exhibition and 23 years since the Whitney Biennale in 2000, his entry into the world of contemporary art.

The works in black noodles include the sculpture “Contagious Migrations” (which began as a critique of Western discourse on AIDS) and drawings that question the “dangerous temptations” of femininity. Many confront a recurring theme in Banerjee’s practice: the politics of the Orientalizing gaze. The designs focus on the female form reproduced, commodified and displayed for consumption by an audience.

Like Sharmistha Ray writing in 2009, “Banerjee’s exotic representations of oriental icons make the Indian more of a passive recipient of the gaze of the outsider – which, in the context of post-colonialism, is the position occupied by the colonizer. The gaze is imperialist and patriarchal in nature.

Ray’s commentary appeared in a larger essay on the rise of South Asian diaspora art. Because Banerjee is Indian-American, or sometimes Bengali-American – she was born in West Bengal, India, and her mother was born in what is now Bangladesh – and because she has traveled through the world’s metropolises, from Kolkata to London passing by New York, she is often considered in the categories of the diaspora or the postcolonial artist. She is currently a postcolonial critic at the Yale School of Art, her alma mater, where she was the only South Asian student in her cohort.

Reflecting on these categories, she commented, “I think diaspora is less about whether it’s real or not, but rather considering the possibility of how culture is doctored, commodified, shared, authenticated, rejected, controlled, divided and used as a tool to engage with groups of people as one community.

The main piece of the Perrotin show, from 2023, echoes one of Banerjee’s most famous sculptures to date, “Take me, take me, take me… to the Palace of love” (2003), a Bright pink 18-foot cellophane recreation of the Taj Mahal that clearly plays with the western exoticism of eastern monuments – a pre-Raj symbol, now national, turned into an exploded tourist souvenir. But in “Black Noodles”, the colorless dome is a wired, bendable, winged object close to the ground. For Banerjee, the clear and empty dome looks like “[bodily] tissue that has been drained,” blurring skin color distinctions.

Emerging from the dome are tentacles that meet the viewer at waist height, topped with glass of milk and entangled in “raw” human hair and rope. On the ground, these threads are dotted with cowries and horseshoe crabs, mixing the organic and the synthetic. Marine rope, emblem of the maritime industry, is another recurring material in Banerjee’s sculptures. “Copenhagen had the first industry that monopolized the rope trade, and its wealth was made on the rope,” she explained. “This rope is made of jute, and jute comes from places like Bengal.”

The ‘Black Noodles’ sculpture alludes to what Banerjee describes as ‘risky’ conversations around commerce and appropriation. Pieces of “raw Indian hair” are commonly imported and worn by black women in the United States and beyond, symbolizing what Banerjee sees as an “idealized and racialized standard of beauty”. But purchased hair also carries particular class and caste connotations in South Asia. The vast majority of India’s hair supply is from of the practice of hair picking – low-income women picking and collecting their own hair to sell, and waste pickers sifting through rubbish and gutters for valuable strands. Throughout the subcontinent, waste management maintains historical links cast oppression. The hair collection reflects the violence of hierarchies long present in South Asia, complicating the narrative of objects from the “East” facing exploitation only in their interactions with “the West”. While Banerjee’s practice is often framed by this fragile East/West binary, it also necessarily involves caste and class.

The questions raised by black noodles crop up in much of Banerjee’s work. How do objects gain and lose value through circulation? When does a cheap object in an online market gain value in the art market – and how does today’s financialized capitalism distinguish between these forms of commodification? What forms of violence, labor and exploitation are exhibited in his work, and what is merely suggested? Who is compensated?

The “Black Noodles” sculpture was born out of a years-long interest in domes and, in particular, their multiple resonances in Mughal architecture, Western national monuments and nature. Banerjee herself invests in a long and laborious artistic practice – acquiring materials from web markets, spending hours weaving ropes and hair. Yet the work – like much of his art – suggests the shadow of a much longer story.

Rina Banerjee: Black Noodles continues at the Perrotin Gallery (130 Orchard Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) until June 10. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.