Sneak Peek: Artist Rina Banerjee Creates “A world Lost…” at the Sackler

For her newest piece, Indian-born artist Rina Banerjee’s site-specific installation, which opens July 13 at the Sackler Gallery, depicts the river as a site of cultural exchange and communication. The sculpture incorporates ostrich eggs, shells and other natural and synthetic materials. Work on the project began Tuesday and visitors were invited to witness the progress Wednesday before the grand opening. Curator Carol Huh says, “Banerjee weaves a fairytale encounter with a place at once playful, dangerous, and endangered—like the river itself.”

The full title of the piece hints at some of these elements: “A world Lost: after the original island, single land mass fractured, after populations migrated, after pollution revealed itself and as cultural locations once separated merged, after the splitting of Adam and Eve, of race black and white, of culture East and West, after animals diminished, after the seas’ corals did exterminate, after this and at last imagine water evaporated…this after Columbus found it we lost it imagine this.”

Leah Binkovitz | | READ MORE

Leah Binkovitz is a Stone & Holt Weeks Fellow at Washington Post and NPR. Previously, she was a contributing writer and editorial intern for the At the Smithsonian section of Smithsonian magazine.