Ranu Mukherjee | Dear Future
18th Street Arts Center is pleased to present Ranu Mukherjee’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Dear Future, which features a multiple channel hybrid film and a selection of mixed-media paintings informed by ruptures and imaginary forests. Mukherjee contemplates forests as sites of survival, biodiversity, non-human agency, indigenous struggle, and interspecies communication. In her speculative process, an emergent urban forest connects visions of an ecological future with histories of colonization and the lush internal spaces of longing, desire, and the imagination.
In this exhibition, Mukherjee takes various approaches to awaken her deep connections with nature and multi-dimensional experience. In layered tableaux, Mukherjee moves imagery and ideas across a variety of surfaces. She composes her paintings with saturated pigment and sari cloth, on which she prints abstract patterns created from digital images of civil and environmental rights demonstrations. Images of extinct birds appear in the paintings; their songs are heard in the film and their rhythms inform choreography. In the film installation Ensemble for Nonlinear Time/ hangar 22, forests are imagined in collaboration with choreographer Hope Mohr and cast: dancers Belinda He, Irene Hsi and Karla Quintero and artists Beatriz Escobar, Sunroop Kaur and Claudia Soares. The film sets choreography in animation, building on from two years of embodied storytelling workshops for immigrant and refugee artists held at 18th Street Arts Center and ARTogether (Oakland) exploring how rupture—and the expertise gained from navigating it—can be a starting point for feeling our way into new futures.
Public programming will include workshops, discussions and live performances.
Ranu Mukherjee is an American artist of Indian and European descent. She makes hybrid work in painting, moving image, and installation to build new imaginative capacities, guided by the forces of ecology and non-human agency, diaspora and migration, motherhood, and transnational feminisms.
With her residency project Ensemble for Non-Linear Time, she works with dense imaginary forests as a protagonist, both in her solitary painting and with cast and workshop participants. In collaboration with choreographer Hope Mohr, their fall workshop series Imagining Futures engaged immigrant and refugee artists in somatic and visual explorations to connect with experiences of rupture as sources of expertise and imagination that often go unrecognized . An ensemble cast for performance and film works includes workshop artists Beatriz Escobar, Sunroop Kaur and Claudia Soares and dancers Belinda He, Irene Hsi and Karla Quintero. This work has been supported by 18th Street Arts Center, 836 M San Francisco, ARTogether Oakland, Bridge Live Arts, Gallery Wendi Norris and Montalvo Art Center.