Rina Banerjee: Take me, take me, take me . . . to the Palace of love presents a unique opportunity to experience the artist’s “Pink Taj.”
New Haven, CT (December 15, 2025)—The Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) announces the installation of Rina Banerjee’s monumental sculpture Take me, take me, take me . . . to the Palace of love (2003), opening on February 7, 2026. Staged in the museum’s Entrance Court, this presentation marks the first showing of the work at the YCBA since its acquisition in 2023.
“Rina Banerjee’s Palace of love is a profoundly complex and visually arresting installation that invites and compels viewers the moment they enter the museum,” said Martina Droth, Paul Mellon Director, Yale Center for British Art. “Suspended from the ceiling of our Entrance Court, it makes us consider our own role in the networks of globalization, consumerism, and the circulation of cultural histories in our contemporary world.”
Banerjee’s translucent sculpture is a critical play on the Taj Mahal, the grand seventeenth-century Mughal mausoleum that has become one of the world’s best-known tourist icons. Banerjee’s structure reimagines this enduring memorial in ephemeral industrial materials: a frame of copper and steel is encased in vibrant pink cellophane, creating a translucent ghost of the original building’s opulent marble façade. The interior of the sculpture reveals an antique Anglo-Indian Bombay chair hovering above a globe, and a chandelier composed of expendable goods—pink foam balls, plastic beads, and artificial birds. These objects challenge our ideas of value, pointing to a global system that produces things to be alternately fetishized or quickly thrown away.
The sculpture’s title, Take me, take me, take me . . . to the Palace of love, echoes the Taj Mahal’s dual function as a somber tomb and a romantic emblem of love. This blend of loss, longing, and grief is central to Banjeree’s conception. “Within us, there is fantasy,” said Banerjee. “We know it is unreal, but it is waiting for us to shape it and bring it forward. In that act, it becomes real, and in this truth lies hope.” Visitors who enter the structure will be enveloped by its glow, looking out onto Louis I. Kahn’s modernist Entrance Court through Banerjee’s rose-colored membrane that reframes the experience of the museum.
This large-scale installation exemplifies Banerjee's artistic practice, which explores the confluence of cultures, geographies, and economies that shapes today’s interconnected global landscape. Drawing on her own multinational background, she gathers diverse and surprising materials that are both precious and disposable, natural and manufactured. Her distinctive working methods blur the lines between the authentic and the artificial to question fixed notions of identity, place, and belonging.
Take me, take me, take me . . . to the Palace of love was purchased through the generosity of Allison K. and Larry Berg; Laura and James Duncan, Yale BA 1975; Adam R. Rose, Yale BA 1981 and Peter R. McQuillan; and Yale University Art Gallery, Heinz Family Endowed Fund.
The sculpture will be on view at the YCBA from February 7 through July 26, 2026.
Rina Banerjee will open a solo exhibition at Perrotin Gallery in New York, NY, beginning April 24 through May 30, 2026.
About Rina Banerjee
Born in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, in 1963, Banerjee spent her early childhood in London and Manchester, England, before moving to the Queens borough of New York City at the age of seven. She earned her master's degree in fine art in painting and printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 1995. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Freer Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC and the Musée Guimet, Paris. Selected group exhibitions include the Venice Biennale (2017); Prospect.4, New Orleans (2017); Busan Biennale, South Korea (2016); Asian Art Biennale, Taiwan (2015); Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Australia (2012); and the Whitney Biennial (2000). Her works are held in more than 30 private and public collections, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art; Brooklyn Museum; Hammer Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi; Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi; and Centre Pompidou. She currently lives in New York City.
Related Programs
Please visit the YCBA’s calendar for the most up-to-date information on the programs that will accompany Rina Banerjee: Take me, take me, take me . . . to the Palace of love.
Spring Exhibitions Openings
Thursday, February 26, 4 pm, Lecture Hall and Livestream
Community Day: A Celebration of Color
Saturday, March 7, 11 am – 4 pm
Curator Tours
Thursdays, March 12, April 9, May 7, June 4, and July 9, 4 pm
About the Yale Center for British Art
Opened in 1977 through the generosity of Yale graduate and philanthropist Paul Mellon, the Yale Center for British Art holds the largest and most significant collection of British art outside the United Kingdom. The collection spans more than five centuries and is the foundation for a museum uniquely focused on the histories, legacies, and shifting contexts of British art. Housed in a celebrated modernist building designed by Louis I. Kahn, the museum is situated on the Yale University campus in the city of New Haven. It is free and open to all.
General Information
The Yale Center for British Art is located at 1080 Chapel Street, New Haven, Connecticut. The museum is open Tuesday–Saturday, 10 am – 5 pm, and Sunday, 11 am – 5 pm. Between September and June, the museum offers late hours on Thursdays and is open 10 am – 7 pm.
The YCBA is closed Mondays and major holidays.
Press Contacts
Yale Center for British Art
ycba.press@yale.edu | +1 203 432 2856
Hanna Gisel, Hanna Gisel Communications
hanna@hannagisel.com | +1 716 866 5302
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