Twinkle Banerjee
The things we carry with us
June 24 – July 21, 2022
Through my relationship with my grandmother, this work is an exploration of colonization, mental health, and generational trauma.
My grandparents were displaced as children and faced a lot of adversity, when the province of Bengal was partitioned and became part of two different nations, overnight. The partition resulted from the communal divide between the Hindus and the Muslims, which was strategically manufactured by the British.
Growing up, for a big part of my life, my grandmother was my prime caregiver. My relationship and what I thought about her, was a very confusing state and stayed that way till 2 weeks before she passed away. Her unresolved mental health issues not only caused a lot of pain and grief for all involved but also shaped her children and later me, her grandchild.
The work is to remind us that when we are trapped in a body, with coping mechanisms we pick as children to survive, it can take a very long time or sometimes never, to come to terms with reality. We live behind a net seeing and experiencing the world differently, but that’s the only world we know.
Twinkle Banerjee (She/Her) is an Indian-Canadian visual artist, exploring work that deals with social issues such as generational trauma, globalization, and human rights. Understanding the pressure put on BIPOC artists for creating trauma related work, she also focuses and experiments with poetic imagery.
She has exhibited in the USA, Canada, the UK, Armenia, has been published in Berlin, and featured on CBC. In 2021 her work “Characters of Memorial Park” was part of an exhibition and publication at the ICP-New York. She hopes to soon document parts of India, that are diminishing due to globalization while trying to decolonize the narrative surrounding photography in the country.
Documentation by Han Sungpil.
