At the Borders Of Painting: Labor and the Migratory Screen-Art of Ranbir Kaleka (original) (raw)
Abstract
This analysis reassesses the video-based moving-image works of the Indian artist, Ranbir Kaleka (b.1953) through figures of internal migration. By reading established and newer works in light of Kaleka’s response to the COVID-19 migration crisis in India, the analysis engages Kaleka’s two-decade long practice, situated in the intermedial exchanges between painting and video-art, through the proposition of a ‘migratory aesthetics’ as developed by the Dutch cultural theorist and artist, Mieke Bal. Emerging from the expansion of video-based installation art in the 2000’s, migratory aesthetics is linked, for Bal, to visual and performance strategies that create spatial displacement, entangled emotive intensities, and multi-temporality. Under the sign of the “migratory,” and through an acutely reflexive use of the video and screen apparatus, Kaleka’s work aligns the escalating crisis of citizenship and labour in the current conjuncture, with the de-regulation of India’s markets in the 1990’s. Kaleka’s works acquire both aesthetic and political saliency as images of ‘survivance’ in such a globalist present. By imbuing the migratory figure with the capacity to extend through time, or otherwise, endure through the phenomenological play of displacement, disappearance and reappearance, Kaleka offers us portents of world-making practices. At stake is the social memory of migration, or of minor practices of return and place-making that survive ongoing processes of state-driven expropriation and physical displacement. These, in turn, underpin Kaleka’s artistic interrogations of the cosmopolitical possibilities of a pluralized culture of people, which might repose, like the image itself, in unfinished if elusive actions of gathering-together and enduring.