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Consider 2007

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Consider 2007
Two channel video projection on painted canvas, 12 minute loop with sound
site-specific installation, Spertus Museum, Chicago
 

 

 

Essay for brochure on Ranbir Kaleka’s Consider, 2007, commissioned by the Spertus Museum with support from the Bernard and Rochelle Zell Holocaust Center.

By Lori Waxman

Memorials have traditionally offered the visitor an imposing, inspiring and everlasting art work upon which to contemplate a historic loss. Think of the towering, pristine obelisk that stands as the Washington Monument or the proud, fixed sculpture of Abraham Lincoln that sits inside the Lincoln Memorial. Imagine walking through one of the monumental classical arches that populate cities across the globe, commemorating French soldiers who fought in the Napoleonic wars, Indian soldiers who died in the Afghan wars, and so many others bravely lost to the world’s battles. Picture sitting by the two reflecting pools proposed as a tribute to those who perished in the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Ranbir Kaleka’s Consider is not a memorial like any of these. Though commissioned by the Spertus Museum in remembrance of the Holocaust, it does not provide consolation for this most horrific of historic events. Instead of materials like marble or stone that will weather the seasons and the decades, a stable and permanent reminder of tragedy, it is a “video-painting” made of partially painted canvas panels and digitally projected light. Refusing to tell its story plainly and graciously, so that the viewer may respectfully and correctly observe it, it presents discontinuous, open-ended narratives that raise more questions than answers. Far from being prominently displayed, it is hidden around a corner and pushed to the far end of an inaccessible light well. Most startling of all, its visual content presents neither the emaciated figures that are the human record of the Holocaust nor an abstract form as symbolic stand-in; rather it pictures a multi-generational, upper-middleclass Indian family at home, focusing on the adolescent daughter of the house.

Only the intangible audio component of Consider bears the explicit trace of the Shoah: amid a soundtrack of secondary noises and twangy Chinese and Aegean music, a woman and a man narrate firsthand accounts of how human hair was used in place of animal fur as an industrial material during the war. The testimonies have implications that are as obvious as they are unbearable, indicating that a body part readily associated with beauty and care—long women’s hair, sometimes braided or strung with pretty coins—was transformed into a usable commodity, dehumanizing the bodies to which that hair belonged. Archived by Polish scholars and heard here in English for the first time, these two oral histories exemplify the gross uniqueness of the Jewish genocide: the exploitation of human beings beyond the grave.

How then do we make sense of Kaleka’s pairing of such disparate audio and video components? Why layer the recollection of heinous crimes over the projection of boisterous family life? And what does it mean to do so in such an ephemeral medium?

To begin sorting out these questions, it is useful to note some moments of overlap between Consider’s seemingly mismatched soundtrack and visuals. The links hide in the details: the Indian grandfather’s transistor radio echoes the narrator’s explanation of how factory workers discovered, through clandestine broadcasts from London, what was going on in the concentration camps. His granddaughter hangs clean laundry on a rooftop clothesline; the voice-over tells of wet hair hung like laundry for drying. Most saliently, the girl’s long dark hair, lovingly plaited by her mother, decorated with gleaming coins, swung this way and that, soaked in a rainstorm, evokes every strand of hair brutally stolen from millions of degraded Jewish heads. These and other associations weave throughout Consider, subtly connecting the normal and the everyday with the tragic and the horrific—an appalling but not unrealistic comparison. By picturing that quotidian space as an Indian one, Kaleka abstracts the Holocaust from its Jewish-European context into a broader human language; he achieves this too through the fact of being not a Jewish artist of European descent but a Punjabi one based in New Delhi.

For all the universality that arises from this layering, so too does an incommensurability. Between these two poles pulses a potent tension worth struggling with, one that lies at the very core of vanguard memorial art today. Artists as diverse as Jochen Gerz, Shimon Attie, Art Spiegelman, and Rachel Whiteread have over the past three decades reinvented what it means to make art about the horrors of the past. As James E. Young explains in At Memory’s Edge: After Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (Yale, 2000), these post-Holocaust practitioners have used an array of non-traditional means—from conceptual art to site-specific slide projection to graphic novels—to make work about a past that they can only know vicariously, through the mediation of others’ memories and research. Their projects refuse to redeem the catastrophes of the past through aesthetic pleasure or to present tidy historic visions by leaving out the messiness of dissemination and interpretation. They heed the obligation to remember while exposing the difficulty of doing so.

Kaleka’s Consider expands on this contemporary mode of memorial-making, transposing its hypermediated memory work into the medium of video-painting that he pioneered in the late 1990s. It is a technique uniquely well-suited to the purposes of critical remembrance: unstable, ethereal, and time-based, it makes meaningful demands on the viewer, who must continuously labor to make sense of the disjunction between audio and video; to register the torrent of information colliding across two screens and a complex soundtrack; to negotiate the discrepancy between painted and projected image. This last tension, between paint and light, challenges the very qualities that have traditionally made large-scale painting a premier recorder of history: by literally painting with light, Kaleka transforms the medium from one of permanence to one that refuses to be still and that disappears with the flick of a switch. A dialectic is established between the animate and the inanimate, as the girl’s projected image floats atop her painted one, bringing it to life while simultaneously revealing its ghostliness, which haunts the work’s entirety. Painting—and its weighty, unbearable subject of the Holocaust—is thereby demythified, brought down to earth where we mortals of today must grapple with it, denied the promise of a history that stays neatly in the past and allows for transcendence in the present, refused any easy—or final—solutions. Instead Consider offers us something that works much more like memory itself, full of after-images, blurred recollections, and uncanny repetitions, graphed onto the present day, where memory truly lives.

 
 

PRESS RELEASE:

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.

 

ArtAsiaPacific NO. 57 MAR/APR 2008
Indian Artist Commemorates Holocaust with New Commission
News / Chicago
By Dyer Cushman

A Holocaust memorial by New Delhi-based painter and video artist, Ranbir Kaleka, is now a permanent fixture at the recently opened headquarters of Chicago’s Spertus Institute for Jewish Studies, inaugurated in November 2007. Titled Consider, after the 1946 poem “Schemà” by the renowned author and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, Kaleka’s memorial, a hybrid video-painting, occupies the 30-foot atrium on the ninth floor where Spertus’ permanent collection of Jewish objects is on view.

Though Kaleka is not Jewish, Spertus senior curator Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek approached him to create the tribute. Heimann-Jelinek had originally approached German photographer and filmmaker Lisl Ponger, who then recommended Kaleka after Heimann-Jelinek expressed her desire that the piece involve imagery from an account by an Auschwitz survivor known only as Nowak, a textile sorter who describes the gruesome day he was ordered to sort human hair including the pigtails of girls from Greece.

Kaleka initially had reservations about accepting the commission and he suggested that the installation feature non-Europeans. Heimann-Jelinek agreed and gave Kaleka free rein on the project.

Rather than follow the tradition of a monolithic memorial, Kaleka’s Consider is projected onto two canvases mounted on the atrium’s far wall and is only visible at a distance of 80 feet from a small viewing platform built specifically for the piece. One of the two canvas screens is painted with the figure of a nine-year-old Indian girl. A video projection of the same girl is perfectly overlaid onto the figure, but periodically flows onto the second canvas as the girl revisits dream-like memories. The projection is accompanied by a recorded reading of Nowak’s first-person account.

Kaleka told ArtAsiaPacific that the work addresses a “continued threat today to minority communities from those that are more powerful.” Kaleka elaborated, saying: “My intention in the installation is to say that all life, irrespective of difference, is precious and thus to shift the purely Judeo-centric reflections of the memorial in order to touch other peoples’ lives.”

Kaleka’s sentiment was echoed by Spertus Institute Museum director Rhoda Rosen, who reiterated to AAP, “We did not want to commission a memorial that was of stone or one that offers to repair the past.Instead, we trusted Ranbir to produce a work of ephemeral materials that both speaks to this unique horror, while reflecting on the enduring beauty in life.”

http://staging.livemint.com/articles/2007/04/14005302/Translating-the-Holocaust-thro.html

TRANSLATING THE HOLOCAUST THROUGH INDIAN EYES
Live Mint, The Wall Street Journal
April 14 2007

Why has a Jewish museum hired Ranbir Kaleka, a Punjabi with a different take on the Middle East, to create a permanent installation piece on the Holocaust?

Melissa A.Bell

When the Spertus Jewish Museum in Chicago decided to revitalize its Holocaust exhibition, the directors made a puzzling choice for the lead artist: a Punjabi multimedia artist known for his playful, overtly sexual work.

The choice becomes even stranger when the artist admits he was reluctant to accept the offer for "obvious reasons" (the Israeli state’s treatment of Palestinians). And, to top it all, this will be the first instance an Indian artist has been commissioned by a western museum to create a permanent piece.

But Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek, the chief curator of the Jewish Museum of the City of Vienna, who was called in to help with the transformation of the Spertus, and Spertus director Rhoda Rosen, were determined to challenge the approach Jewish museums take toward the Holocaust, and Ranbir Kaleka has never been one to shy away from a challenge.

Delhi-based Kaleka has been painting for more than 30 years and his vibrant work exudes a calm confidence. As a painter, he attempts to capture stories without end in paint. His multimedia work, meanwhile, combines painted images with film, creating a surreal landscape of living images. The New York Times called his work "a multimedia sleight of hand, in which reality and illusion dance a gentle dance".

One of his most famous pieces, Man with a Cockerel, shows a man and his mirror image endlessly grappling with loss, discovery and love, through the capture and escape of a cockerel against an ethereal, painted plane.

Kaleka, 54, says his work creates a hyper-image, with "the presence of the painting, but with the aura of image made with light". His installation for the Spertus will follow this tradition, tracking a painted girl, with braided hair, as she crosses from her canvas to a transparent screen in search of memories.

The girl, as well as all the characters and the ambience of the installation, will be distinctly Indian. The narrative voiceover will have an American accent, rather than a Germanic or Polish one. Therefore, the visual and aural aspects will not reference the Holocaust, broadening the scope of the piece beyond that moment in history. Of course, the anecdote that forms the plot of the installation comes from an Auschwitz survivor, recounting his work which involved separating wool in a factory in the concentration camp. Eventually human hair-including braided hair, lovingly decorated with coins and pieces of fabric-passes through the factory and the workers must separate that as well.

However, Kaleka says it will not be a weepy, dramatic account of the horrors. It will be a matter-of-fact telling that expands our interpretation of the past and insists that all human life is valuable.

Kaleka pauses often to ruminate over his words, carefully choosing his explanation of how he came up with his Chicago installation piece. He says most Jewish museums focus their Holocaust exhibitions on extreme visualizations of torture or attempt to recreate how Jews felt, through disorientation or claustrophobia. Neither, he says, can ever begin to reveal to the viewer the true experience of the victims.

But Kaleka has a greater issue with most Holocaust displays: the Jewish-centric preoccupation with the event. "The Jewish people have suffered a great deal, but other people and other races have, too. Perhaps, not in one major event like this one, but there have been moments in history like this one. And it continues to happen today."

He said that he couldn’t undertake a work today that spoke solely of Jewish suffering. But, as he thought of it, he realized a shift could be made in the study of the Holocaust. And, as an outsider, he was ideally situated to contribute to the shift from a European-Jewish focus on the event to a universal look at human suffering.

So when he visited the museum last fall they decided to address the European-Jewish fate, not as a singular, but as a universal fate. The piece will reside on the ninth floor, in a space that overlooks Lake Michigan. His girl will float on a space between the sky and the water.

Back in Delhi to work on the piece, a sense of optimism permeates Kaleka. His home of the past five years reflects this. The airy apartment, where he lives with his wife and son, is bathed in light from several windows. Soft oranges and pinks decorate the walls. A pillar has morphed into a whimsical grey totem pole marked in black symbols. An androgynous drawn figure surrounded in a purple flurry of butterflies watches over the scene. And a spoilt white cat tiptoes around. Here, the Holocaust seems like a distant nightmare.

But Kaleka’s no stranger to institutionalized violence. He has watched his own state suffer during Operation Bluestar, and when he speaks of the repression of Palestinian protests in Israel, an edge appears in his usually soft voice. His work is a risk for the museum. He says he admires its directors for taking that risk. The funders of the museum will not see the piece until it is finished-only a month before the planned reopening of the museum. Kaleka says they can veto the piece. "They can say, ‘How does this Indian know and why is he dealing with us?’"

The museum is set to open in September 2007. Kaleka’s work can be viewed online at www.rkaleka.com.