‘Crossings’, 2005, 190 x 250 cm, 4-channel video projection on painting (video still), 15′ loop with stereo sound
For more on this work see here.
Crossings is an epic, with four screens spread over four oil paintings upon which four video images play out. The oils themselves comprise isolated individuals, singly, together or in line. These might be refugees or simply bystanders, contemporary figures who come from ‘somewhere else’, surrounded by spaces they don’t know, able to survive only through projecting upon what is around them their memories of the past. Images swirl round them like birds…
In full display here is the key grammar of Kaleka’s work, an oil painting that becomes a moving image, blank spaces that become suffused with projectiles drawn from memory. It is intended, says Kaleka, to be a ‘painting living within time and time living within the painting’, a ‘play between stylisation and verisimilitude’.
— Ashish Rajadhyaksha
‘Cul-de-Sac in Taxila’ (edition 3 of 3), 2010, 70 x 94 cm, video on oil & acrylic painting (4 still panels), 3′ 55″ loop with sound
For the artist’s description see here.
‘Forest’, 2009, 340 x 600 cm (variable), video projection on painting (video still), 16′ loop with sound
For the artist’s description see here.
‘House of Opaque Water’, 2013, 222 × 1097 cm
For more on this work see here.
‘Man with Cockerel’, 2004, two-channel video, 29″ loop
A bald man with a placid, Buddha-like face, clutching and letting go then clutching and letting go a plumed fowl: this rhythmically repeated, soft-grey image offers a tantalising grasp of desire, an allegory on dispossession. Kaleka’s subject-matter is representational and yet, by the form and brevity of its videoed avatar, by a trick of durational fallacy, by sheer transience, it erases its signified meaning.
The imaged body – at the brink of dissolution and disappearance – reads like an index of mortality. Its quotidian identity is subordinated to a fragile sense of being where no assertion, no action is necessary except that which trusts in a minimal continuum of survival. The language of representation enters the liminal zone and the encounter, sanguine, serene, evanescent, resembles a haiku where the hypothesis offered about a lived life needs no backing of proof.
— Geeta Kapur