দাদার খোঁজে
FINDING DADA
ANINDITA BANERJEE
13 May – 7 August
Deakin University Art Gallery, Melbourne Burwood Campus
Anindita Banerjee (born 1983, Kolkata, India) is a self-described ‘twice uprooted passenger seat migrant’, moving first to the United States of America and now living on the lands of the Wadawurrung people of the Kulin Nation (Ballarat, Victoria). Never intending 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. They include 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 her memories of Bengali ceremonies that she has practiced throughout her life. In her reconstructions of these rituals, she layers memories, 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.’
Image: Anindita Banerjee, Ishaan 2025 #2, 2025/26, inkjet print on Ilford cotton rag paper, collection of the artist, © the artist.
