…Perhaps the best piece is by Kaleka himself: Man Threading a Needle is a video loop of a man poised on the point of threading needle, cast onto an identical painting of the same subject. The protagonist does not move, except for the inevitable movement of a person sitting still. ‘We liked this for its way of extracting a notion of time out of painting and a notion of light out of film and making a third thing… Paintings are important in India but here some of the paintings might just look exotic’. So one of the roles of these Austrian curators is to decide how the Viennese context will affect the look of a piece; there is little point in including works whose significance drains away to leave mere exoticism.

David Lillington is an art critic and curator who has published widely on contemporary art.