The first time I met Myna Mukherjee, she was the eye of a storm.
It was closing night of the Jaipur Literature Festival, and a frantic crowd of authors, IT experts, models, designers, visual artists, protesters and fans had gathered at High Line Nine. To the outside observer, it seemed as though these disparate groups had nothing in common but Mukherjee, South Asia’s premier cultural producer and curator. I watched in amazement as she conjured the human tempest and then, with a clear vision, commanding voice and pair of platform combat boots, tamed it into a nourishing rain.
So, as I walked into our interview the next week, her gentleness caught me by surprise. “Thank you for coming,” she said with a smile as she unlocked her most recent exhibition. Techné Disruptors (II) features works imagined with many controversial technologies of our time; holographs, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, virtual reality, and minted collections of Global South NFTs, or non-fungible tokens. “There’s so much humanity here,” she said, sweeping her hand across the darkened gallery space.
Though technology and humanity may seem incompatible, Mukherjee uses the new medium to dissect deeply human topics like sexuality, religion, gender, power and erasure. “Technology is disruptive, different from the rest of the art world,” she said. “The rest of the art world is so stiff. Technology is playful. It collapses nationality and allows me as a curator to connect with people.”
Herein lies her curatorial superpower: revealing the interconnectedness and “hidden resonances” between seemingly disparate things. “The thing about South Asian arts is, Grace,” she told me, “that everything connects to everything else. The literature…the dance, the music, all of it is somehow seamlessly connected.”
Mukherjee began honing this talent in her early life, encouraged by her father. “Ambition is not a good thing in the South Asian world. Women aren’t taught to be ambitious. They have a conflicted relationship to power,” she said. “My dad was in the military. He was very keen that I’d be independent.” She left India to pursue policy and management at Carnegie Mellon University.
“I worked as a VP on Wall Street, shockingly enough,” Mukherjee continued with a chuckle. She credits her years at KPMG with developing her crucial intuition. “If something is of importance to me, I can persuade sponsors that it’s of importance to them as well. And most of the time it’s true,” she told Open Magazine in May. “It’s just about being able to connect the dots and I’m good at being able to connect the dots.”
Then, on a year-long sabbatical, she started a feminist dance company with her formal dance training. After suffering a knee injury, she turned to cultural production and never looked back. A mere five years later, she’d founded one of North America’s largest human rights film festivals, I View World.
Since then, Mukherjee has produced and curated the best in contemporary South Asian cinema, visual art exhibitions and performance festivals. Internationally, her creations have debuted at Lincoln Center, the Asia Society, the Queens Museum, and Tribeca Film Festival, among others. She’s also brought awareness to local artists as a programming consultant for the British Council, American Centre, High Commission of Canada, and other embassies in Delhi.
In 2019, Life Style Asia Magazine named Mukherjee one of the top 5 curators revolutionizing the Indian arts scene. Later, in 2020, she received a prestigious invitation to co-curate survey program Hub India, representing the Indian ecosystem to Artissima, Italy’s most important art fair.
Mukherjee’s recent projects, though, are perhaps her most ambitious. Her show Vita Nova 2022: A New Life, closed at the Italian Embassy Cultural Center in Delhi on May 31st, and two separate projects debuted at the India Art Fair 2022, one of which was the primary edition of Techné Disruptors.
Mukherjee’s work happens through Engendered, her transnational organization that focuses on South Asian arts, culture, and human rights. “Engendered was created because I felt there was a certain ghettoization of South Asian arts at that time. It was the old, ancient stuff that youth could not connect to. It almost seemed fossilized and very far away from what we were going through.”
“If you don't mind,” she said rising from her chair, “I’m gonna walk you through one or two of these.” We traced the perimeter of the gallery, stopping at each piece for her thoughts and observations.
“We talk about fundamentalism,” she said as we approached a flickering NFT entitled The Past (Is) Tense by Harshit Agrawal, “and honestly, that doesn’t interest me at all. I feel like the right is the mirror image of the left. Finally, we can not talk in binaries, but about what’s going on in between, and can use art to do that. This is an interesting and fairly controversial conversation that’s happening in India - the idea that every Islamic structure has been built on top of a pre-existing Hindu one. This piece looks at one of the most historical and well known Islamic structures, and tries to take away all of the Islamic influences through AI.”
And onto the next. “This artist was so ashamed of being queer that he went to the railway tracks to commit suicide, and he lost his legs. When he woke up, he was in a hospital bed and he realized that even God didn't want him to die. So that's the way he tells the story. He said, that after he decided to be openly queer and to tell his story through paintings.”
“And this artist,” she said, “is a star in South Africa.” We turned, and the painting in the corner made me catch my breath - a thick, black, uncovered braid, entitled Bound by Rochelle Nembhard & Gemma Shepherd. “Hair is weaponized, as we are seeing in Iran right now with what's happening with the hijab…women across the world are second class citizens. We have the hardest struggle, but I also think that makes us resilient, more resourceful, quicker when there is a moment of strife. I think the focus is very important. The more specific we get, like I said, the more common all of our struggles are.”
The topics her exhibitions examine - sexuality, gender, religion, repression - makes her a controversial figure.
“I don’t court controversy ever, but I do wanna talk about contemporary times. I'm a curator who's interested in contemporary art. And for me, contemporary is not a style. Contemporary is the time that we live in. And if the time that we live in is pregnant with so many questions, it is important that we keep asking them.”
“Clearly, there are no simple answers,” said the Wall Street executive, the professional dancer, the lauded curator, the daughter, the woman. “But, the answer is in asking those questions over and over again. And art is the best way.”
“If you think of something as linear, the further you go away from your past, then time is just something that distances us from everything being known,” she said about those questions, “unless you think of time as recycled. In India…the body is the only thing that’s temporary, but the soul remains, and it continues to be manifested in different avatars.”
One woman, many lives, all lived in pursuit of beauty.
Techné Disruptors (II), on view in Gallery Five, closed on September 30th. Image: @satanssj