Ranu Mukherjee, Movement 1, print design for A Bright Stage (detail), 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco

Ranu Mukherjee: A Bright Stage

Ranu Mukherjee employs drawing, painting, animation, and choreography to create hybrid installations that blur the line between the moving and the still image by imbuing each with qualities of the other. Her work investigates the construction of culture through the forces of creolization, migration, ecology, speculative fiction, and desire as a collision of events that mark what she calls “shadowtime,” a sensation of different timescales coalescing into one. For Wilsey Court, Mukherjee is creating an installation expanding over the four walls that frame the atrium. Entitled A Bright Stage, it combines wall painting with printed fabric and video animation into a dynamic environment reflecting on the cultural and spatial perspectives of the museum in general and the atrium as a freely accessible public space in particular. With the adjective “bright” describing qualities both visual and auditory, it amplifies the atrium’s qualities and potentialities as a freely accessible place for public voice and action.

It feels as if culture is cracking open right now, and I’m thinking a lot about the amplification of public voices carrying histories of colonialism and feminism.

Ranu Mukherjee

In the news

  • 'A Bright Stage' reflects on the cultural and spatial perspectives of the museum and the atrium as a freely accessible space for public voice and interaction.

    The San Francisco Bay Times,

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