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.

Ranbir Kaleka @ Bose Pacia

March 2008 New York – Bose Pacia presents Fables from the House of Ibaan: stage –1, an exhibition of new work by Ranbir Kaleka. The gallery is located at 508 West 26th Street on the 11th Floor, in the Chelsea district of New York City. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday 11 to 6 pm and Saturday 12 to 6 pm. The artist will be in attendance at the opening reception on Thursday, March 20 from 6 to 8 pm. The public is invited.

Ranbir Kaleka's work has been described as "creating a seemingly living tableau on a canvas and screen." Kaleka's new work continues this project of producing art in a third, liminal space between painting and video, which is not as much a hybrid as a transmutation. The first part of Kaleka's 2008 exhibition at Bose Pacia New York includes three installations comprised of video projections onto painted canvases. The second installment, commencing in September 2008, will include a large multi-media painting installation entitled Reading Man.

The title work of the current exhibition, Fables from the House of Ibaan: stage 1, depicts a man seated at a table in his home. As the scene unfolds the viewer gets the sense of the passage of time as the central figure's life carries on around him while he sits contemplatively. As time passes the large jug (both proverbial and literal) of milk is filled and emptied. For Kaleka, the work itself can be seen as a suspended entity whose teleological function is one of spacio-temporal relations. As an artist whose earlier career was met with much acclaim for his painting, Kaleka has challenged the typical demarcations of media by developing a medium which contains elements of both video and painting. He is able to animate the otherwise still surface of a painting while simultaneously giving form and space to the light and fleeting presence of video.

Kaleka's interest in cinema is the impetus behind his initial work in video. His works contain elements of neorealist cinematographers such as Michelangelo Antonio and Vittorio De Sica. Kaleka's lexicon of visual and audio iconography harkens to this form of realism that makes tangible the essence of being in the present; in a moment of action. It is this phenomenological exploration that gives Kaleka's video and painting installations the aura of experiencing something almost hyperreal. Viewing Ranbir Kaleka's work is like a manipulation of time in which one may both experience the moment of action as well as view it from above.

Ranbir Kaleka was born in 1953 in Patiala, Punjab, India. He studied at The College of Art, Punjab University and the Royal College of Art, London. Fables from the House of Ibaan: stage –1 is Ranbir Kaleka's second solo exhibition with Bose Pacia. The artist has participated in many solo and group exhibitions internationally including a multi-media installation commissioned to permanent collection (Spertus Museum, Chicago 2007); Urban Manners (Hangar Bicocca, Milan 2007) New Narratives: Contemporary Art from India (Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago 2007); HORN PLEASE: The Narrative in Contemporary Indian Art (Museum of Fine Arts, Berne 2007); Art Video Lounge (Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami 2006); Hungry God: Indian Contemporary Art (Busan Museum of Modern Art, South Korea 2006); iCon: India Contemporary (Venice Biennale, 2005); Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India (Asia Society, New York 2005); Culturgest-Lisbon (Lisbon, 2004); Zoom! Art in Contemporary India (Lisbon, 2004); subTerrain: Indian Contemporary Art (House of World Culture, Berlin, 2003).Ranbir Kaleka currently lives and works in New Delhi.

Ranbir Kaleka

NEWS!!!!
Multi-media installation commissioned by Spertus Museum, Chicago. Tentative title, ‘Thus time passed and we got used to many things’.

Spertus Museum has commissioned Indian artist Ranbir Kaleka to produce a powerful, open-ended reflection on the Holocaust. With the aim of finding a universal language to express the horror of the Holocaust while not losing the particular, Jewish nature of the genocide, and with the expressed intention to find a contemporary approach to memorialize the atrocities of the Holocaust, Spertus Museum senior Judaica curator, Dr. Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek sought to commission a work that reminds us of the humanity that was taken away from people – even beyond death.
Consider, a title inspired by the poem of the same name by Primo Levi, and arrived at in consultation with Heimann-Jelinek, is a unique commission for Spertus Museum. An installation consisting of two projections, a painting and an audio narrative of oral testimony from Auschwitz, this work poignantly juxtaposes accounts of utter dehumanization alongside civilization’s investment in the gift of life.

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The installation will consist of two projections: one on a painting, another on a transparent screen.

Apart from the oral testimony the work will retain its specificity only in the aspect of the ‘human’. The installation, viewed from afar, will occupy a discrete space instead of in-your-face foregrounding of it.

Through the transparent screen we will see the sky and Lake Michigan. A girl who is having her hair braided in the painting will, time and again, leave her painted body to visit her memories etc. in the ethereal space of the transparent screen.

Note: Installation involves curatorial inputs by Dr. Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek and Rhoda Rosen, the director of the museum, has been very supportive of the concept and the commission.

Krueck & Sexton Architects, who realised Jaume Plensa's concept at Millennium Park (The Crown Fountain) are the architects for Spertus.

Warm wishes,

Ranbir


Spertus is located at 610 S. Michigan Avenue, directly across the street from Chicago's Grant Park.

Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies
610 S. Michigan Avenue
Chicago, IL 60605

all photos courtesy of the artist, Venice Bienalle, and Walsh Gallery of Chicago