Ranbir Kaleka
Unbelievable fragility and beauty of being
October 28–November 14, 2016
Gallery Under The Mango Tree
Merseburgerstrasse 14,
10823 Berlin
Ranbir Kaleka’s works have achieved an immense international significance in the last two decades: they have been exhibited in museum, bienniale, foundation and gallery contexts in Venice, Berlin, Lisbon, Vienna, New York, Mexico City, Sydney and in India. One amongst the 15 finalists who were chosen from a total of 105 nominated artworks from 24 countries for the Asia Pacific’s best in Contemporary art, 2014, Ranbir’s works were shown recently at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art Moscow, China Art Museum Shanghai, Minsheng Museum Beijing, and KNMA Delhi.
Unbelievable fragility and beauty of being is Ranbir Kaleka’s first solo show in Berlin and represent a short and an intense body of work spanning over a few years. Ranbir Kaleka reminds us of the fragility and the beauty of the human consciousness, with its unsettling dependence on an eloquent enterprise by which it feels simultaneously restrained and empowered. Kaleka´s works have an open ended narrative and evoke the idea of exploring eternal subjects like life, death, loss and aspirations.
In the video installation Cul-de Sac, Taxila a white horse magically appears when a man waves a hammer, facilitating a narrative that dwells on desire and struggle. The work features a man dressed in a black suit sitting still and holding a wooden hammer. When he suddenly raises the hammer to strike the air, a white horse appears before him. The title comes from Ranbir’s fascination with the city of Taxila; destroyed in the 5th century, it was an important stop on ancient trade routes as well as a centre of learning. Kalekas work suggests that the man has the aspirations to explore Taxila but cannot find the way to it. The horse appears and disappears and the man’s relentless wait is measured with the persistent sound of a drop of water falling into a pan behind him. Why the horse? The white horse also represents the travel to the house of the bride for the Indian wedding ceremony. We are here dealing with an understanding of time, memory and a deep desire.
Amongst three printed canvases on the same floor, the Gallery´s basement offers another video. Man with Cockerel, 2001–2002, although a pure video, locates the artist’s implicit commitment to painting. In addition to the conceptual density and its masterly poetic qualities, the intensification found in Kaleka is certainly based on the fact that, by using the medium of film, he succeeds in integrating or making the presence of human temporality in the medium of the painting perceptible. Michael Wörgötter, a filmmaker, artist and curator, contrasts the process of doubling in Kalekas works to those of Andy Warhol. He quotes: “Although both the artists take the principle of doubling as their starting point, Warhol pursues an extensive movement via the serial and its extensive variations thus arrives in the direction of the peripheral, whereas Kaleka, in contrast moves towards the centre and intensification. In Kaleka’s case doubling something singular does not automatically mean the creation of something plural, instead it suggests the possibility of difference within this singular…“
Born in 1953, in Patiala, Kaleka was educated at the Punjab University, Chandigarh, and the Royal College of Art, London; he has lived and worked both in Britain and India. In the three decades of his artistic activity, he has produced both a remarkable body of paintings as well as a body of trans-media works that gestate sophistication with an excellent opulence of image.
Gallery Under The Mango Tree constantly pursues an exchange, a dialog between societies through art. Representing exhibitions of young and established international artists; such exchange transforms the format of the private gallery into a public art space in which the artworks are presented alongside musical performances, workshops, readings and dinner discussions.
