Sarnath Banerjee
Fathers (2024)
Commissioned work
Courtesy of the artist
Dates
20.9.2024–16.2.2025
Details
Drawings and text
Location
Neue Galerie Graz, Graz
Part of
Horror Patriae: Exhibition
Production specifics
Commissioned and produced by steirischer herbst ’24
Peter Rosegger and Rabindranath Tagore, who competed for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, were contemporaries but never met. In a series of captioned drawings that read like a small graphic novel (a genre for which he is renowned), Sarnath Banerjee deftly explores the parallel timelines of their lives and the huge social and cultural differences between the two national poets.
Unlike Rosegger, Tagore was born to one of Bengal’s wealthiest families. He was a consummate cosmopolitan and a staunch universalist. His views were exotic not only in Europe but, to a degree, in India as well. When Tagore won the Nobel Prize, the Austrian press vented its racist ire on the Bengali poet, while the Styrian parliament moved to lodge a formal complaint. Banerjee examines strange coincidences and commonalities in their biographies and looks beyond the mechanisms of poetic veneration to the human beings behind the myth.
Retrospective
Retrospective