The Mrinalini Mukherjee Archive
Asia Art ArchiveDocumentary
Asia Art Archive is an independent non-profit organization co-founded by Claire Hsu and Johnson Chang in 2000 in response to the urgent need to document and make accessible the multiple recent histories of art in the region.
During the past two years, the Asia Art Archive in India team meticulously researched and digitized the personal archive of the late Indian sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee. In this film, Researcher Noopur Desai, Research Assistant Pallavi Arora, and Curator Samira Bose discuss their labour and preoccupation with the artist’s archival materials.
Project Information
Directed by Annette Jacob
Animation by Deepti Megh
Additional Edit Support by Kopal Jain
The archive includes photo-documentation of art historical sites and traditional art forms; installation instructions and detailed documentation of her monumental sculptural works; papers such as correspondences, manuscripts, and photo-documentation relating to the art community in India; and a small but significant set of documents on her mother, sculptor Leela Mukherjee.
The film uses the Mrinalini Mukherjee Archive as a case study to introduce the archiving work of Asia Art Archive, especially how connections and propositions can be drawn from the archiving process to reveal what cannot be seen about an artist’s practice. The film explores the theme of obsession in the archiving process of the Mrinalini Mukherjee Archive, and depicts what it is like to be completely engrossed in the archive, along with the multitude of feelings - obsession, frustration, inspiration - that come with the process.
The animation attempts to recreate what looking at an archive with the curiosity of the archivist might feel like, a process that often leads to discovering details otherwise missable, like a tender portrait of Mrinalini Mukherjee nestled among documentation of her sculptures.
The animation speculates on the clues found in the photographs of in-process images of Mrinalini Mukherjee’s work, drawing connections on possible inspirations, and attempting to capture what her process might have been like.
The process of animating this was an investigation similar to what the archivists might have undergone, digging through her archive, connecting dots, multiple forms of photo documentation and instruction and making sense of the vast magnitude of images.
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