He was a good man 2008

Installation Stills

Press

Reviews

Installation Still
Bose Pacia Gallery, ‘Fables from the House of Ibaan: stage - I’, New York
Solo Show, March 20 - May 3, 2008

16th Biennale of Sydney - Biennale of Sydney, Sydney
18 June - 7 September 2008

Since the late 1990s, Indian artist Ranbir Kaleka has been overlaying painting and video on the same plane. His works merge the time and light of the moving image with the constancy and materiality of the painted image. He Was a Good Man (2008) shows a middle-aged man threading a needle. The man is mostly still, intensely focused on the needle which he occasionally attempts to thread, followed by some twitches and jerks in a cycle where the past and the present run into each other in a phantasmagorical flow. At one point the painting on canvas in the installation is lit by the projector light alone, devoid of any video image. In another passage, the illusory depth of the painting is destroyed by the silhouetted flat shadows on the canvas, which confirm its flatness and establish the installation as an artefact before the loop begins again its spell of movement and depth.

Shivangi Ambani-Gandhi
(excerpt from Indian Artists in Sydney Biennale 2008, artconcerns.com)

in conversation with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev curator, Sydney Biennale 2008

Yet, she reserves her highest praises for Ranbir Kaleka. "He is one of the greatest artists in the world, well known for his radical originality and innovation."

Since the late 1990s, Kaleka has been overlaying video on painting. His new work for the Biennale pays homage to his first work created using this technique, Man Threading a Needle (1998-99). "I am usually weary of new media video installations, but Kaleka’s He was a Good Man (2008) is a phantasmagorical narrative of a middle-aged man intensely focused on threading a needle. The projector flickers on and off, and the whole work twitches and shivers, but the needle never gets thread--the narrative doesn't even exist". Christov-Bakargiev explains, "Kaleka is interested in movement as a psychological emancipation." and emotional emancipation is what viewers will get at this Biennale.