Ranu Mukherjee works in hybrid forms of painting, video and installation, guided by the forces of ecology and non-human agency, diaspora and migration, motherhood and transnational feminisms. She draws inspiration from the histories of collage, feminist science fiction and Indian mythological prints (19th-20thc). Employing layers of saturated color, printed pattern on sari cloth and animated overlays of image, tempo and choreography, she amplifies physical presence and sensuality. Her recent work considers how experiences of rupture and longing can be catalysts for building new imaginative capacities.

The genre of speculative fiction has been critical in Mukherjee's artistic development, as a guide to considering otherness (human and otherwise) in relation to somatic experience, cultural construction and power. She takes up speculative fiction as a generative method to look at contemporary urgencies as opportunities for renewal. 

 There is cultural time and there is material time. The body connects to both. -notes on Shadowtime

awkwardness and beauty. engaging the visceral through a hybrid and visibly crafted aesthetic

color. the space of color, the life of color, the non white-ness of color. Michael Taussig’s What Color is the Sacred? color as an actor, context or stage. color as an animate force and an embodiment of time

creolization. inventing visual forms of Creole, encouraging broad recognition of the complex legacies making up the urban environment. elements sometimes flow together smoothly, and at others are jammed together awkwardly. this is the construction of culture. the making of work that is at least bi-lingual. migration is the origin story

excess. paying a certain kind of attention. working with the excess produced by instrumentalized narratives, information, bodies, objects, everything. the sheer amount of focus and work it takes to resist the forces of instrumentalization

fragment as a unit of measurement. pictorial wholeness no longer makes sense. the incomplete is familiar. it is imperative to leave an opening for what we don't know

figure-ground a new urgency around figure-ground relationships pervades

landscape as a stage and an energetic body. the compressed spaces of body, stage and picture plane. the specificity of place. the importance of the experiential in the making of meaning. the crossing syntaxes of project based work and picture making

neo-animist. vibrant matter, a distributed body. identification with a wide spectrum of organic matter.deep ecology. expansiveness. see the work of Betti Marenko

neo-futurist. speculative fiction. the narratives we have about the future- literary, journalistic, popular and data driven. the other side of the Modernist dream- a watershed moment for industrial production

nomadic. the condition of contemporary life- the un-static. the contradiction between a desirable philosophical space and a potentially exhausting life style. sometimes through desire, sometimes a condition of work, war and other forms of violence, economics. an uprooting and spreading of visual matter and information. a demand. a demand on artists.

0rphandrift  a collective artist/entity that emerged in 1994 through Suzie Karakashian, Ranu Mukherjee, Mer Maggie Roberts and Erle Stenberg, plus several collaborators.  www.orphandriftarchive.com

procession a form able to carry individual expressions within collective production. the performance of reassembled mythologies for the purposes of re-alignment and recognition. an honoring.

race and abstraction being visibly mixed in a precarious and divisive historical time and place makes the question of representational identity- and picturing bodies - tricky, generative and uncomfortable.

shadowtime the contemporary uncanny nature of time. a neologism invented with the help of Bureau for Linguistical Reality in 2015; definition; the feeling of living simultaneously in two distinctly different time scales,  or the acute consciousness of the possibility that the near future will be drastically different than the present.

time travel. the expansiveness of the body and the ability to perceive differing temporal scales- some that are epic. The scale by which energy takes affect.

tentacles i am the mother of triplets. i make things in 3’s. i have been 2 boys and 2 girls. i have grown 3 organs. i was well prepared for motherhood through speculative fiction and cyberpunk. i make work which has at least one easily accessible dimension. i think about what we leave. Octopuses have 3 hearts and great shape shifting capacity, some day I will find a way to communicate with one.

unknown, the stranger within myself. the stranger that is half of my DNA. making space for the unknown to guide the work. the resistance to explaining it all away.

unmaking occupying images and forms as an artist, to unmake them. re-mak ing them into artworks that have a performative capacity. teasing out tensions between performance and representation, 

xeno-real. pictures from late 19th and early 20th century India which describe the beginning of the post-colonial. the playing out of the post-colonial.seethe work of Christopher Pinney