Debjani Banerjee fuses Henry hoover with Hindu god Ganesha
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- Debjani Banerjee's exhibition centres on a sculpture called Henry-Ganesha — a Henry hoover reimagined as the elephant-headed Hindu deity Ganesha, seated on a strip of garishly patterned carpet.
- Banerjee grew up watching all 94 episodes of a BBC Mahabharata adaptation with her father, an experience she credits with shaping her blend of Bengali mythology and British suburban life.
- A "music room" plays a film collaging two Mahabharata TV adaptations, a photograph of the artist's mother in a saree holding a Pepsi can on a British hillside, and clips from a CBeebies cartoon named Cheese.
- The show contains twin shrines — one to the demoness Putana, who haunted the artist's childhood nightmares, and one to Cheese, the CBeebies character who played a similar formative role with her own daughter.
- A patchwork quilt along the exhibition's longest wall depicts five female Mahabharata characters and was stitched during a workshop with local residents at a previous Glasgow exhibition.
- Two songs loop in the music room — one composed by Rabindranath Tagore, the other invoking the mother goddess Kali — both sung by the artist's sister, Mita Pujara.
- The exhibition takes its title from a Satyajit Ray film whose climactic scene shows a servant pulling back curtains at daybreak to symbolise cultural continuity despite an era's end.
Why it matters: Banerjee's central claim — that 'cultures are preserved in museums only after they are dead; the living ones survive in the tales you tell your children, the pictures you make to decorate your living room, the quilts you stitch with your neighbours' — offers British diaspora audiences a model of preservation as irreverent adaptation rather than frozen display.
