(to be published, 2007)

by Geeta Kapur

This excerpt was included in a talk by Geeta Kapur on video and light-based installations at School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi on 10th November 2005. This was part of a lecture series by Geeta Kapur who was a Visiting Professorial Fellow at the School in 2005.

The use of the digital medium allows Ranbir Kaleka to achieve a transparency, a spectral quality, where the (male) character/person/body is both present and absent, reducible to a pixel puzzle and conjured as a simulacrum -- a copy of that which does not exist in material terms or just enough to throw a shadow and create a contemplative moment of identification. A video image of a pockmarked man in a vest threading a needle (Man Threading Needle, 1998) is beamed on a framed painting of the same man; the live image and the still painting fuse; the soundtrack picks up the hoot of a train, the cry of a summer peacock, the threading fails. The six-minute loop with an image that is neither still nor moving achieves in its failed action a subliminal existence.
A bald man with a placid, Buddha-like face, clutching and letting go then clutching and letting go a plumed fowl (Man with Cockerel, 2001): this rhythmically repeated, soft-gray image offers a tantalizing grasp of desire, an allegory on dispossession. Kaleka’s subject-matter is representational and yet, by the form and brevity of its videoed avatar, by a trick of durational fallacy, by sheer transience, it erases its signified meaning. The imaged body – at the brink of dissolution and disappearance – reads like an index of mortality. Its quotidian identity is subordinated to a fragile sense of being where no assertion, no action is necessary except that which trusts in a minimal continuum of survival. The language of representation enters the liminal zone and the encounter, sanguine, serene, evanescent, resembles a haiku where the hypothesis offered about a lived life needs no backing of proof.

Geeta Kapur is a critic, art historian and curator