For Patiala-born, Delhi-based artist Ranbir Kaleka, the temporal nature of our experiences structures our existence in the world. Kaleka’s practice surveys and interprets time in varied textures, including the fragility of memory, the archiving of history, cultural migrations, and shifting psychological states and modes of perception. It also considers the experiences of other, non-human presences such as landscapes, animal beings and objects of utility or personal significance through which we form relations with the world. ‘Time continues to have a presence even in stillness,’ he says, ‘forging a narrative even if nothing quite happens.’ In one sense, circularity is a natural trope whose provenance is on loan to man-made cultures, much of which is preserved and enacted through the iterative quality of our collective imaginations. In Kaleka’s view, narratives maintain a circuitous, durational quality, carrying temporal suspensions, ruptures and recurrences without resolution. Though narratives relating to socio-political realities, historical trauma and personal encounters are implied, Kaleka’s oeuvre resists linear progression by emphasizing psychological time, shaped by memory, emotion and anticipation, over chronological time.
- Dipti Anand
