Sarnath Banerjee

Hailed as the foremost Indian comic book writer since his graphic novel Corridor (2004), Calcutta-raised, Berlin-based Sarnath Banerjee has evolved into a globetrotting visual critic with post-colonial wit in the eerily imperialist order of a neo-liberal third millennium. A self-described “sideways reporter of insignificant things,” he is an affable commentator on the quotidian, a recorder of the pedestrian, and a believer in the importance of the mundane, bringing minor stories into greater narrative frames to measure up to history. Reflecting on his profoundly relational work, he has said that it “doesn’t exist in isolation” and that “the reader is very much part of the work.”

Putting his words into practice, Banerjee has devised a vast multimedia installation for the 13th Berlin Biennale. The work combines drawing and audio, on the structures of typical newspaper stands found in India’s public spaces. Entitled Critical Imagination Deficit, it is a testament to Banerjee’s diagnosis of a fleeting era of intellectual dominance—a crisis in Euro-American hegemonic power structures, the symptoms of which he may have keenly observed from his German home.

As bold as it is modest and ambitious—as the comic often deceptively is—how might Banerjee’s Critical Imagination Deficit stand up on a musealized street? Or could it, in fact, only exist there? Could the piece withstand the confrontation with the street? I believe it would—and hope that by doing so, it will restore what the artist terms “political being and imaginative flight.”

Text: Claire Tancons