Hanging by a thread

Rina Banerjee, Take Me, Take Me, Take Me to the Palace of Love (detail), 2003.

It’s hard not to make a beeline for Rina Banerjee’s elephantine pink, plastic palace in “Figures of Thinking: Convergences in Contemporary Cultures,” a traveling exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center. Suspended from the ceiling with wires, and hovering about a foot off the gallery floor, Banerjee’s translucent structure beckons with its breathy title: Take Me, Take Me, Take Me to the Palace of Love (named after a 1950s Hindi movie). It may not be a marvel of engineering like the Taj Mahal, but it is a marvel. The Bollywood music from her nearby video piece, When scenes travel…bubble, bubble, is an added pleasure.

The India-born, Brooklyn-based, Yale-trained artist is known for her videos and complex installations that are as much an amalgam as she is. East and West are evident in her works that explore ideas about home and the exotic. Take Me was originally part of a much larger installation commissioned for the exhibition “Yankee Remix” at MASS MoCA, a contemporary-art space in Massachusetts. By the title, it should be clear that Banerjee is playing around with the romantic notions Westerners have of the East. Take Me manages to fit into the sprawling themes of this show, which include issues of identity and globalization (outlined in a lengthy essay posted on the wall near the entrance). It’s surprising how agile a great piece of art can be when roped into a group show.

“Figures” was packaged by Pamela Auchincloss/Arts Management, a New York outfit that prepares exhibitions for small venues like university art museums. It was cocurated by Vicky A. Clark and Sandhini Poddar, who state in the accompanying catalog that they chose 14 artists who are all “products of the impulse to move, either physically into new environments or through their work that has to do with transformation in some way.” This exhibition partly succeeds because you don’t need to read the catalog to enjoy the work. But you can easily enter into the minds of the curators if you do; they’ve included a transcript of a conversation called “Collecting Our Thoughts.” 

Included in “Figures” is work by the Kenya-born, New York–based, Yale-trained art star Wangechi Mutu. (Rhona Hoffman introduced her work to Chicago audiences in 2004.) Shown here is her mixed-media series of collage and paint on Mylar. Mutu slashed imagery out of fashion magazines and incorporated the glossy fragments with drawing and shimmery paints, creating glam, distorted creatures. There is also an installation with upside-down wine bottles and Cutting, a video by Mutu that shows a woman whacking a pile of wood at sunset. While Mutu’s collages come across as a social critique about obsessions with the body, Cutting is a mystery.

Scattered about the room are pieces by a personal favorite, Mona Hatoum. It’s not clear how the London-based Palestinian conceptual artist’s Rubber Mat—a silicone floor piece of innards from her 2000 sculptural series of doormats—fits in, either, but all we want to do is take off our shoes and walk on it.

Yuki Onodera, a Japanese photographer working in Paris, has a number of her black-and-white images here, including some from a 2000 series that presented mysterious portraits of anonymous buildings glowing in black fields. Also noteworthy are Lesley Dill’s “thread” pieces—giant wall works that look like drapes of horse tails. Dill is known for her use of text (she’s fond of Emily Dickinson), and Blonde Push incorporates a line by the poet woven along the top.

The curators had more than materiality on their minds when they selected the artists. The catalog opens with a barrage of words filling a page, to wit the first line: “synapses, freedom, spirituality, history, belief, pulse, webs.” There are points where these diverse artists converge; but there are plenty of strands going off in unique and compelling directions.

“Figures of Thinking: Convergences in Contemporary Cultures” is at the Cultural Center through March 25.