Sweet Unease by Ranbir Kaleka
Volte, Colaba
I’ve always had some difficulty engaging with trans-media art. Unlike the more traditional and conventional forms that I have grown accustomed to, works of this nature rarely come with the in-built cues that tell viewers what to watch out for, what to attend to, what to acknowledge. Trans-media art makes for a more immersive experience – viewers must contend with multiple streams of information and sensory stimuli, and arrive at a negotiated understanding of what they see, hear and sense. Viewing such art is a challenging and often unwieldy process – which is why it helps when the effort seems rewarding.
‘Sweet Unease’ Ranbir Kaleka’s first solo exhibition in Bombay
I approached these works looking for a hook or two that would allow me to access them in their entirety – a wasted effort, because I soon realized that there is no one element that holds them together. They are complex, and demand time and absorption. Eventually, I had to permit myself to experience the works in fragments and parts, and it was only through repeated viewings that I was able to derive some sense of the wholes. It seems to me that this lack of coherence is at least partly deliberately constructed.
Kaleka superimposes the bizarre onto the ordinary, the almost-there onto the most-certain, and his works retain a slipperiness that evokes those moments in which we realize that things are not always what they seem, and that there are cracks beneath even the most solid surfaces. He forces us to grasp at images and meanings, and there is a palpable open-endedness to the viewing. There is an all too rare conjunction here between media and theme(s), and I wonder why we haven’t seen or heard more of him.
Myth ↔ Reality: Constructing Cult-u’re - Group Show
The Guild, Colaba
The name of the exhibition, the punctuation, the pun, all work together to assert that this is a show about the continuous making, re-making and un-making of myth, fact, belief and consequently, culture. We are invited to think of culture as mutable, as a dialogue rather than inheritance.
Such themes that lend themselves easily to multiple interpretations. Sutras scrawled on driftwood, the evanescence of reflections, the mysteries of the physical world in which a single substance can be liquid, solid and vaporous, the implications of the many meanings and pronunciations of a given name, the increasingly intimate connections between consumer choice and personal identity, the multiplicity of personal narratives – these are all legitimate, if not equally accomplished or sophisticated ways in which to address the constructs of self and permanency.
The works I found most interesting were Job Koelewijn’s ongoing reading project, in which the act of reading is endowed with physicality, transforming our experience of text. Renata Poljak’s videos and photographs spotlighted the intersection of costume, performance and nationality – perhaps the show’s only attempt to explore culture within an explicitly political framework.
The show was relatable, accessible, earnest and honest, but I must admit it would have been interesting to see a little more conceptual complexity, and to have had the artists push their envelopes a bit further. Having known the curator, Veerangana Solanki, for some time now, I am aware that she attempts to seek out artists we don’t often see, and media we don’t attend to enough (along with everything else, two movies by Johan Grimonprez are screened at regular intervals). She’s succeeded on both those counts, although the show is fun, rather than exceptional.
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