Mixing Dusts, 2017 EXCERPT digital video installation, BD-R projection on glass with concrete base edition of 5 + AP running time 8:39 As artist-in-residence at the de Young Museum, Ranu Mukherjee recorded pairs of participants rolling on the ground while hugging. In Mixing Dusts, footage of this intimate and difficult action is sequenced into a constructed space where the embracing bodies appear in motion on mutable and unsteady ground. Expressions of love are made incongruous by an underlying sense of apocalypse and uncertainty. Mukherjee replaces the epic art historical image of the kiss with an image of love that is tender, awkward and perhaps more grounded in common experience. Mixing Dusts is the first video work in Mukherjee’s ongoing project Shadowtime. In 2015, Mukherjee collaborated with the Bureau of Linguistic Reality to coin the term meant to capture "the feeling of living simultaneously in two distinctly different time scales" or "t he acute consciousness of the possibility that the near future will be drastically different than the present." As artist-in-residence at the de Young Museum, Ranu Mukherjee recorded pairs of participants rolling on the ground while hugging. Footage of this intimate and difficult action is sequenced into a constructed space where the embracing bodies appear in motion on mutable and unsteady ground. Expressions of love are made incongruous by an underlying sense of apocalypse and uncertainty. In 2015, Mukherjee collaborated with the Bureau of Linguistic Reality to coin the term, "Shadowtime", meant to capture "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." Since then it has added layers of resonance for her, particularly as a multi-racial artist in a precarious and divisive historical moment. "Shadowtime" becomes a noun about unknowing. It expresses the cognitive dissonance of equally possible yet divergent futures. Layering images of natural disasters and exodus, the artist personalizes incomprehensible fear with undeniable notions of hope and love.