The stories we are told shape the world in which we live. If your father had insisted you watch all 94 episodes of a television adaptation of the Mahabharatawhen it was screened on the BBC, as Debjani Banerjee’s did, it’s easy to imagine that your family’s Henry hoover might come to resemble Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu deity with a similarly long trunk. My own Irish mother meant that I was always hearing banshees at my bedroom window, as if she had brought them over to England with her. In a sense, she had. And so, Banerjee’s charming sculpture of a vacuum cleaner as the god of new beginnings, situated at the heart of this witty and moving exhibition, reflects an imagination shaped by 1980s British suburbia and an ancient Bengali literary tradition.
Sitting on a strip of garishly patterned carpet, Henry-Ganesha captures the double consciousness of anyone who grows up with more than one cultural inheritance. But the work also encapsulates a more general principle: that every generation must adapt the cultures they inherit to their own circumstances if those traditions are to survive. Banerjee’s collaborative art takes her Bengali heritage as a means through which to ask questions that will resonate with anyone living in Britain today: how do we preserve the cultures that bind us together when things are falling apart? How do we pass on knowledge to our children? What should we carry into a rapidly changing future, and what must we leave behind?
