Ranbir Kaleka (New Delhi)
Miraculous Non-Events
Lecture-Performance
Synopsis: Starting with the first five years of his life in a village haveli (mansion), where each family member was a unique storyteller, Kaleka’s lecture-performance revolves around snippets of stories and images of his video, painting and sculptural works. “My brother and I were the only two children in the large house. Nothing major ever happened in the house, and time moved slowly, giving great significance to the tiniest ‘non-event’. These types of phantasmagoric performances and the architecture of the haveli formed my inner life and sense of visual proportion. As I moved out from the village to the town, and then to the city, travelling to different regions of India, I actively collected orally-narrated stories from strangers and friends. From the recesses of my mind where they had settled, the accumulated stories emerge as invented ‘events’, creating a psychological map of my mind and of the people amongst whom he lives.”
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Bio: Raised in the city of Patiala, India, Ranbir Kaleka works in both Britain and India. In the three decades of his artistic activity, Kaleka has produced a remarkable body of paintings — vibrant with phantasmagoria and epic disquiet — along with a body of trans-media works that combine conceptualist sophistication with a calibrated opulence of image. Kaleka’s work has been exhibited in variety of museums, biennials, foundations and gallery contexts and across cities such as Venice, Berlin, Lisbon, Vienna, Tokyo, New York, Mexico City and Sydney, among others.