Ranbir Kaleka

Auroboros:

To light up his path, a horse rider turns on his torch/flashlight, but light from the torch doesn’t brighten the rider’s path but the beam of light illumines only the back of his own horse.

I was thinking of many things: The sheer impossibility of absolutely accurate predictions of what lies ahead in time and space, the necessity of illuminating the past before a movement forward, cyclicality, self-reflexivity, the ancient Ouroboros symbol of Serpent swallowing its own tail, the failure of systems, the futility of circular thinking.

This too: At the legs, the man’s  body merges with the horse’s body, implying they are one. The man could be looking for its scattered self to put it all together in one piece. The horses body would fit into one piece as a jigsaw puzzle but the shape of the pedestals makes this ‘coming together’ into a whole an impossibility.

The little girl is added digitally to give sense of scale,.. the sculpture is a a little under 2.50 Metres (over 8 feet) tall.


Warmly, Ranbir



P.S.
Ranbir is an amazing artist that I had the wonderful opportunity of presenting his lecture at SAIC, he has sent me this new work and I am working on getting the video of the lecture uploaded which will be posted here soon.