Asia Art Archive in America is pleased to announce our upcoming exhibition “mould the wing to match the photograph.” Drawing on the archive of Mrinalini Mukherjee, one of the most prominent sculptors in India known for her experimentation with form and materiality, this exhibition will stage an encounter between a selection of primary materials and newly commissioned artworks by artist Sreshta Rit Premnath. With a focus on Mukherjee’s artwork, Yogini, and a related set of instructions and 35 mm slides, the exhibition will explore how the archive actively reconfigures the understanding and experience of her work, particularly through the eyes and practice of contemporary artists today. The first iteration of this exhibition was presented in New Delhi by Asia Art Archive in India in 2022, where the team had digitized Mukerjee’s archive between 2020 – 2022. The project was then hosted at Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong between September 2023 through February 2024, before arriving in our Brooklyn space for a January 2025 opening in the U.S. 

A note from our commissioned artist Sreshta Rit Premnath:

“Collectively titled Spine Speak, my sculptures, text pieces, and twine weavings for the Asia Art Archive commission will aim for a resonant frequency alongside Mrinalini Mukherjee’s archive. Hidden armatures and points of suspension provide a sense of precarity to Mukherjee’s upright sculptures – heavy and unwieldy skins of knotted fiber, that seem to defy gravity. I am drawn to them because support structures – architectural and ideological – that shape our bodily relation to each other are a central theme, and a formal strategy, in my artwork. As I immerse myself in Mukherjee’s archive her work takes root in me the way only the best art can, inspiring new material possibilities that I feel but cannot yet speak.”

Notes from the Curators:

“mould the wing to match the photograph” stems from our immersion in Mrinalini Mukherjee’s personal archive as part of the digitizing process at AAA in India’s office. The exhibition materializes simmering internal lunchtime debates about how Mukherjee’s digitized archive would and could alter and disrupt our perceptions of the artist’s practice.  

Mukherjee’s extensive photo-documentation of her own work allowed us a certain closeness to her sculptures without direct physical proximity. As we scanned contact sheets, one after another, we noticed subtle shifts in angles through the repetitive and seemingly compulsive way in which she reassessed her sculptures through photography. The singular was multiplied to the point of being overwhelming, the forms constantly whirring in our minds. An animation experiment enabled us to express the seriality of the still images, where the artist appears as a specter for just a moment, adjusting a fold. 

Another exploratory mode was through 35mm slides, viewed in our prop-up lightbox, where the monumental was experienced as microscopic. This formal apparatus allowed us to distort scale, to zoom in and out, and to forge a strange kind of intimacy. 

A lingering thread in the exhibition began during a heated debate among the curatorial team about the absence of preparatory sketches, drawings, maps, or blueprints that could shed light on how Mukherjee planned and executed her sculptures. How did she create such monumental sculptures of intricate symmetry without any measurements or demonstrative notes? This led us to scant interviews and lecture notes where Mukherjee describes her practice as “intuitive,” “improvised,” and “something which grows in all directions”—hence, perhaps, explaining why her preparatory process cannot be seen in the archive.  

And yet, one thing we did find in the archive—for the already completed sculptures—was a set of highly codified installation instructions. This finding conveys a different and unexpected sensibility, with the works carefully annotated and measured to the centimeter. Made by her then-husband and late architect, Ranjit Singh, on Mukherjee’s instruction, these were used in the absence of the artist to install her works. 

The archive also led us to speculate about the references and research behind her works. A large set of photo-documents of her extensive travels to art historical and cultural sites, across Asia and beyond, revealed Mukherjee’s consistent preoccupation with the forms and motifs that appear in her works. The organizing of an archive is not orderly nor linear, and we worked on these images alongside photographs of her works-in-progress from her studios in New Delhi. The armature of the sculptures began resembling the arches of temple ruins, and suddenly we could see the way the overgrowing roots of Angkor Wat extended as tendrils in her effigies, while the folds of the moving Kathakali body seemed to shape the wings of her works.  

The title of our exhibition, “mould the wing to match the photograph,” is borrowed from Mukherjee’s installation instructions, and evokes the kind of back-and-forth that occurs between an artwork and the reproducible digitized archive. In this imperative statement, Mukherjee marks her precise vision, and yet every time the artwork, and now, the archive, are circulated and presented, they are moulded and shaped anew. 

—Noopur Desai, Pallavi Arora, and Samira Bose

“mould the wing to match the photograph” is curated by Noopur Desai, Pallavi Arora, and Samira Bose of Asia Art Archive in India, with support from AAAinA’s Claire Kim and Ying Chiun Lee. Additional support by Christopher K. Ho, Crystal Li, Özge Ersoy, Paul C. Fermin, Rebecca Tso, Ruby Weatherall, and Sneha Ragavan.

Artist Bios

Mrinalini Mukherjee (1949–2015) was a prolific sculptor based in New Delhi, India. Best known for her monumental sculptures in fiber, ceramic, and bronze, Mukherjee was trained in the painting and mural design at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda (1965–72) and studied sculpture at the West Surrey College of Art and Design, UK (1978). Mukherjee received a fellowship from the Government of India in 1981 to work at Garhi Studios in Delhi, where she worked recurrently till the early 2000s. She participated in residencies at European Ceramic Work Centre (EKWC), Netherlands in 1996 and 2000. Mukherjee began exhibiting her sculptures at an early stage of her practice and her work has been shown in several solo and group exhibitions in India and abroad ever since, including the Paris Biennale (1980); Sydney Biennale (1986); Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1994); Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane (1996); Nature Morte, New Delhi, and Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai (2001); Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi (2007); National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi (2015); Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2018); Met Brueur, New York (2019); and Venice Biennale (2022).

Sreshta Rit Premnath is an artist from Bangalore living in Brooklyn. His recent installations, videos, and paintings have explored the interdependent relationship between bodies, and the architecture that supports and confines them. He has had solo exhibitions at venues including MIT List Visual Arts Center, Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati, Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Contemporary Art Gallery Vancouver and Nomas Foundation in Rome. He is the founding editor of Shifter, a platform that convened public discussions and produced topical publications at the intersection of art and theory from 2004-2021. He is an Associate Professor of Art at Williams College.

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Archiving Mrinalini Mukherjee, 2023. Produced by Annette Jacob. Animation by Deepti Megh. Edit support by Kopal Joshy. Special thanks to Helutrans and Pica Pica Media Limited. This video was produced during the iteration of “mould the wing to match the photograph,” hosted by Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong and is being shared here to contextualize the digitization process of the Mrinalini Mukherjee archive. 

“mould the wing to match the photograph” is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council, The Ruth Foundation for the Arts, and The Vilcek Foundation, and other foundations and individuals.