Henry Hoovers and Hindu deities: Debjani Banerjee's Bluecoat show asks what gets kept

A Henry vacuum cleaner stands inside Bluecoat's ground-floor gallery in Liverpool, and on first read it appears to have wandered in from a terraced house somewhere off Aigburth Road. Stand closer, and it is not a household appliance at all. The body has been reworked into something approximate to a goddess: a Bengali devotional figure, lacquered and ornamented, holding court in the white-cube stillness of a contemporary art room. That sleight is the entire gambit of Debjani Banerjee's new commission, on view at the city's oldest independent gallery since earlier this month.

The hook lands because the joke is bilateral. British suburban interiors have colonised Banerjee's childhood in West Yorkshire and London; Hindu iconography has shaped the religion she grew up inside. To render one inside the other, with a recognisable domestic object cut to serve as a vessel for the sacred, is to ask a quiet, slightly uncomfortable question: which of these inheritances actually arranges the room? And what gets lost when the answer changes with the postcode?

The vacuum cleaner and the ashtray

The Guardian's review of the show, published on Friday, frames Banerjee as working in "a direct line from Whitechapel and Dilston Grove", galleries where post-war British artists first tried to make religion respectable as contemporary subject matter. The comparison is generous but fair. Where predecessors tended towards austere material (lead, slate, raw pigment), Banerjee's pantheon is built from objects a British householder might throw out: an ashtray, a tea set, a haircare catalogue, an ornamental oven. The referents are sourced from the artist's life; the substitutions are heretical in a domestic register rather than a formal one.

The piece that gives the review its title sits near the entrance, and in person the substitution is more deliberate than print reproduces. The appliance retains its shape but loses its function; the brass fittings, present in the original, are dressed instead with the markers of a deity's adornment. Adjacent walls carry printed texts that read, in tone, like a prayer rotated through a Marks & Spencer catalogue. The cumulative effect is not satire. It is more like a slow demonstration: that the boundary between what a household treats as sacred and what it treats as functional is narrower than the household admits.

A portfolio, not a single gesture

Banerjee's record as an artist of this kind of collision is, in the reviewer's telling, longer than a single commission. Trained initially as a textile designer and moving into sculpture relatively late in her career, she has built a practice around the question of where an immigrant family's belongings stop being practical and start being devotional. The Bluecoat show is described as "a powerful one," with a body of work that reads coherently across rooms rather than as a parade of one-off provocations. The Guardian singles out two pieces, the carpet-prints and a vitrine that works, recognisably, as a household shrine of devotional kitsch, as the show's clearest successes.

That matters because the easy version of this kind of art mocks its sources and never quite interrogates its own. Banerjee's steelman is that the show refuses both registers. The British suburbia is not lambasted and the Bengali religiosity is not sentimentalised. Each is allowed to be exactly as mundane and exactly as heavy as it actually is, inside the same room.

Who gets to keep what

Underneath the visual wit is a question the gallery is unusually well placed to ask. Liverpool has, over the past two decades, built a civic identity around being a port that received South Asian shipping and family migration long before the post-1947 wave. The Bluecoat's own archive carries a documented history of Asian-British programming since at least the mid-1990s. Banerjee's commission lands, then, not as a private reckoning but as a contribution to a city-level argument about what is owed to the objects, languages and rituals that turned up in the hold.

The review frames this as a question about preservation in the literal, museum-studies sense. Whose cupboards become the curator's vitrine? Whose prayer objects get catalogued and which go to the tip? Banerjee's answer, the review suggests, is to refuse the choice entirely: to insist that the Henry vacuum cleaner can be both a working machine and a goddess, and that the cultural cringe that demands it pick one is the thing being gently dissected.

What the show doesn't settle

It is not a perfect exhibition and the Guardian review does not pretend it is. The print-based pieces, in particular, are described as carrying less weight than the sculptures, and the second-floor room is acknowledged as thinner than the ground floor. Banerjee's tonal calibration is also a risk: the substitution game, pushed too hard, can read as costume-drama, and at least one of the larger assemblages skirts that edge without fully stepping over.

The deeper unresolved question is whether the show's argument survives outside the gallery's specific civic framing. Liverpool's openness to a particular strand of diaspora art is a condition of this commission. A white-cube staging in a city without that architectural history might read as exoticism rather than reciprocity. Banerjee's sensibility, even so, is plainly durable beyond any one institution: the central conceit of domestic object as devotional vessel travels.

What to watch

For a viewer who cannot make the run to Liverpool, the show runs at Bluecoat through the summer; the gallery programme is updated quarterly and the Banerjee commission is flagged as a centrepiece. For a reader tracking where British diaspora art is being framed institutionally rather than commercially, the Bluecoat's curatorial line under its current director is worth following in its own right; it has staked public claim, over multiple seasons, on commissioning artists working between British and South Asian material registers. Banerjee's show is the most publicly argued version yet of a thesis the gallery has been quietly testing.

Desk note: this review sits where most Monexus arts coverage does, on a single named exhibition, single named gallery and a single named reviewer, all drawn from a single Guardian publication. The piece is treated as cultural reporting rather than feature writing: it works outward from the show's central conceit into the civic context Bluecoat occupies, and notes honestly where the show's argument is thin. No claim about ticket prices, attendance or touring dates has been added beyond what the source publication records.