Debjani Banerjee review: Is this Henry’s Hoover or a Hindu God? | art

TThe stories we are told shape the world we live in. If your father insisted on watching all 94 episodes of the TV series adaptation of Mahabharatown when it aired on the BBC, as Debjani Banerjee did, it’s easy to imagine that your family’s Henry Hoover might resemble Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu god with a similarly long trunk. My Irish mother meant that I always heard sinister noises at my bedroom window, as if she had brought them with her to England. In a sense, she had. Thus, Banerjee’s mesmerizing sculpture of the vacuum cleaner as god of new beginnings, which lies at the heart of this intelligent and poignant exhibition, reflects an imagination shaped by 1980s British suburbia and ancient Bengali literary traditions.

Sitting on a strip of patterned carpet, Henry Ganesha embodies the double consciousness of anyone who grows up with more than one cultural heritage. But the work also includes a more general principle: that each generation must adapt the cultures it inherits to its own circumstances if those traditions are to survive. Banerjee’s collaborative art takes her Bengali heritage as a medium through which to ask questions that will resonate with anyone living in Britain today: How do we hold together the cultures that hold us together when things fall apart? How do we transfer knowledge to our children? What should we bring into a rapidly changing future, and what should we leave behind?

Diverse influences on the artist’s imagination come together in the film, which is shown in a “music room” complete with sofas and cushions. It brings together scenes from two television adaptations of the Mahabharata; a photograph of the artist’s mother wearing a sari and holding a coolly branded Pepsi can on a desolate British hillside (an image reproduced elsewhere as an out-of-proportion Technicolor texture); Clips from CBeebies cartoons featuring the attractive wheel of cheese (called cheesecake), which the artist watched every morning with her daughter; And many more besides. Addressing at various points to Ganesha, the artist’s mother and daughter, the film collapses between the old and the new, the fantastical and the banal, the familiar and the strange (on which side of that the elephant-headed god and the block of cheese fall into a pigtail fall depends on where you look from).

Banerjee’s surreal juxtapositions do not trivialize high culture in the sense of relegating it to the level of daytime television. Instead, they re-enchant everyday life, bringing Indian gods into a typically British world full of anthropomorphic vacuum cleaners and horrific carpets. So it makes sense that the gallery would have twin shrines to the demonist Putana, who haunted the dreams of the young Banerjee after the obligatory Mahabharata. Sessions and Cheese played a similarly formative role in the relationship between the artist and her young daughter. These collisions between the local and the mythical insist that culture is a collective experience, gaining its value not through the empty veneration of literary stories but through the connections it forges between people.

This commitment to culture as a community is clearly expressed in the patchwork quilt that runs along the longest wall in the gallery. Depicting five female characters from the Mahabharata, and embroidered with dangling sequins, shimmering silk and rippling feathers, the artist created it as part of a workshop with local people during a previous exhibition in Glasgow. A testament to teamwork and collective creative expression, the work’s irreverent treatment of mythological traditions offers another reminder that traditions remain alive in retelling. Cultures are preserved in museums only after they die. The living live in the stories you tell your children, the pictures you take to decorate your living room, the TV you watch with your family, and the quilts you sew with your neighbors.

In the music room, two songs play repeatedly: one, the film’s soundtrack, was composed by the great Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore; The other invokes the mother goddess Kali. Both are sung by the artist’s sister, Mita Pujara, and are the beating heart of the show. In this respect, the show resembles the Satyajit Ray film from which it takes its title. In the climactic scene, a dancer performs for the last in a line of cultured landowners whose patronage made the flowering of Bengali art possible. After the performance, he is dismayed when all the light bulbs in his music room go off: he realizes the impending end of his life and the era of Bengali culture that it symbolizes. But his servant runs to the window and pulls the curtains to throw light into the room: he says that dawn has come and the sun will continue to rise. The scene is included in Banerjee’s film along with a clip of the artist dancing in her music room.