Anindita Banerjee

I am a twice uprooted Indian in search of a new home, in the fringes of a growing metropolis at the bottom of the world, in the suburbia of Melbourne. My experience of living in a diaspora has somewhat dissipated into a constant negotiation of reconfiguring my social identity in response to conditions imposed by others.

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Through lenses of socio-political ideologies of hybridity and liminality, I challenge this notion of ‘fitting in’ to sociocultural spaces literally and metaphorically. I make ritualistic drawings with rice flour and water and recreate rituals from assembled memory and perform them in unfamiliar spaces.

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I aim to test the existence of the ‘cultural otherness’. This I propose, lies beyond habitual diasporic arrangements, transactions, and interventions, those which have caused a dichotomy created by the ‘Occident’, between the reality and the romantic notion of the ‘Orient’. This, I do by either staging my identity in other’s spaces or by getting others to stage my identity in their spaces.