published in 2003
The House of World Cultures, Berlin, Tulika Books, India
ISBN: 3-9808851-9-40 (House of World Cultures)

exhibition
BODY•CITY - subTerrain: Artworks in the Cityfold
House of World Culture, Berlin
Germany Sept 20 - Nov 16 2003

by Geeta Kapur

In exact contrast ... ‘is’ the video-work of Ranbir Kaleka, whose aesthetic is based on the principle of liminality. The use of the digital medium allows him to achieve a transparency, a hallucinatory 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. Or, on the other hand, to tantalize vision itself with a fleeting grasp of desire. Whether it is his pock-marked model in a vest, a carpenter threading a needle in a superimposed image, at once painting and video-shot (Man Threading Needle, 1998–99), or a placid bald man with the face of the buddha clutching and letting go then clutching and letting go a plumed fowl (Man with Cockerel, 2001) Kaleka presents the body as an index of mortality — at the edge of its dissolution, and disappearance. Precise name, identity, gender and profession are 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 form itself resembles a haiku in that the hypothesis it offers is profoundly about a lived life that needs no backing of proof.

Geeta Kapur is a critic, art historian and curator