If you have any questions about our media releases or would like to connect with a member of our team, please reach out to us.
Boronia Lyddieth
media@deakin.edu.au
Anindita Banerjee: দাদার খোঁজে – Finding Dada
Exhibition at Deakin University Art Gallery
Open until 7 August 2026
Deakin University Art Gallery is proud to present a new exhibition by Deakin University graduate, Anindita Banerjee curated by Kira Godoroja-Prieckaerts.
Born 1983, Kolkata, India, Banerjee is a multidisciplinary artist and committed arts worker living on the lands of the Wadawurrung people of the Kulin Nation (Ballarat, Victoria). Banerjee’s contributions to the larger Victorian arts community were recognised last year with the Arts Award in the Victorian Multicultural Awards for Excellence.
Banerjee is a self-described ‘twice uprooted passenger seat migrant’, moving first to the United States of America and relocating to Australia in 2010. Leaving her career in Human Resources and IT to pursue the creative arts, she completed a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) Creative Arts at Deakin in 2016 and a PhD at Deakin in 2021.
Having never intended to leave her homeland, she grapples with a life that is split across places as she finds and creates a new space for her own experience. Her work interrogates ideas of cultural otherness, authentic identity and belonging.
For this new body of work, Banerjee combed through the archives of her life to select photographs of significant men in whom she finds reflections of her Dada’s (grandfather’s) facial features – family, mentors, friends and cultural leaders across different aspects of her life and communities, including Indigenous Australasian peoples.
She overlays their portraits with ritualistic mark-making inspired by memories of the Bengali ceremonies that she has practiced throughout her life. In her reconstructions of these rituals, she layers memories of peoples, cultures, generations and places - searching for a sense of home and self.
Maybe I unwittingly look for Dada in their soft, powerful presence. Or maybe it is in the Australasian DNA we share. Or maybe still, it is my unconscious, migrant desire to feel like I belong to these sacred lands of the Aboriginal people. Or it plainly comes from the desire to hold onto something that I have left behind in the sacred lands of where I was born.
Artist
‘The দাদার খোঁজে – Finding Dada series is a compelling moment of firsts for Banerjee,’ says curator Kira Godoroja-Prieckaerts.
‘It is the first time the artist has portrayed men in her life and communities, as well as the first time she has used the batik technique.’
During a visit to India in late 2025, Banerjee learnt batik from the artisan Sanrag Saha. She then commissioned Saha to create wax drawings over four large photographs printed on fabric. These works now sit in the centre of this exhibition, alongside a further 15 photographs with digital and wax drawings to complete the series.
Also included in the exhibition is the series অন্দরমহল (Ondormohol), 2021/25, which Banerjee created as part of the Ballarat International Foto Biennale 2021 and then editioned as a folio last year.
Taking inspiration from the reoccurrence of Victorian style buildings in her past home of Kolkata and her current home of Ballarat, these photographs portray an imaginary life of 1900s Bengali women living 10,000 km away in Ballarat.
This was Banerjee’s first use of the digital drawing over photographs, which continues through to the new series দার খোঁজে – Finding Dada.
‘Anindita and I were really excited to connect these two series, bringing the masculine and feminine together,’ says Kira Godoroja-Prieckaerts.
‘The more we talked about these series, the more she realised that দাদার খোঁজে – Finding Dada is the next stage of an artistic journey she began with অন্দরমহল (Ondormohol).’
WHAT: Anindita Banerjee: দাদার খোঁজে – Finding Dada
WHEN: Now until Friday 7 August 2026
WHERE: Deakin University Art Gallery
Building FA, Melbourne Burwood Campus, 221 Burwood Highway, Burwood
Open Monday to Friday from 10am to 4pm and entry is free.