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From Venice, Berlin, Lisbon, Vienna, New York, Mexico City to Sydney, how does it feel to be the superstar of Indian art at international platforms? When on an international platform, an artist’s main concern is to make the work visible and to see that the installation strategies do not falsify or distort the context of the work.
When you amalgamate different forms of art, what are the challenges you face? The work is of no value if the amalgamation does not strike a resonance with viewers. I personally want works to evoke contemplation. Newness might attract but soon becomes stale. Your idiom lying somewhere between painting and video is so gripping...were there many hiccups before you discovered it? I let it grow in my head for many years before making the first image. In a world where people’s attention spans are getting shorter by the day, is it becoming more difficult to engage the viewer? Is that why you moved towards the unusual idiom? It’s true that instant gratification seems more the norm. In painting, even if the image falls on the eye in an instant, its reading happens in ‘time’. My recent works are time-based mediums and only watching it unravel in real time can be rewarding. I didn’t arrive at this medium to be heard louder amid the clamour of the art world. This is the result of a long thought-out exercise in making my works meaningful and insightful.
Since after passing out from the Government College of Art, Chandigarh, you studied at Royal College of Art, London how much of your artistic sensibility do you owe to the western notions of art? We, in India, are familiar with moving images from the time of cinema’s early history. Since West has a long tradition of collecting museums, they have some great works of art from which you certainly imbibe. The Royal College of Art introduced me to great art from other cultures and I discovered heterogeneity instead of any singular western sensibility. About your imagery that is often erotic`85 especially in works like Sweet Unease, do you have to be often apologetic about it? Or have the Indian viewers and collectors become comfortable with the idea of eroticism? The frequent museum/gallery visitor and collector familiar with art history is sufficiently exposed to erotica. Anyhow, many people in the privacy of their homes browse much more extreme sexual imagery on the net then usually found in galleries. I include in the work only what its context demands. For instance, frontal nudity in all its unabashedness expresses an ease with one’s corporeal self. The vulnerability is gently tempered by the gradual comfort found in the acceptance of the body one has. What is the prime purpose of art — to engage an artist visually or conceptually? Making and reading the work involves engaging with both. Your participation in 4th Guangzhou triennial that opened on September this year at Guangdong Museum of Art has been well received. Tell us something about your work. The Indian section called ‘Memories of Cinema’ had five of my installations. Projections were set up in multiple ways. Three of Mani Kaul’s films Dhrupad, Siddeshwari and Arrival were run on a loop on a single large projection surface. It was an experiment to see how cinema is ‘read’ in an art-museum space Is the road to success full of struggle? When an artist achieves fame he tries to romanticise his hard work? Has your journey been easy? The kind of success we are talking about involves many factors other than the talent of the artist. It involves ‘luck’ and opportunities to make your work visible. I can say I have been fortunate. It may not apply to all artists but many international dealers are into ‘brand making’ that can involve both the work and the artist and yes in the process ‘romanticising’ does happen. We have to remember that individual stories differ and we have artists from difficult childhoods and unexpected backgrounds making it through hard work, grit and talent. Add oodles of creativity and unbridled imagination tampered with technique mastered over decades to that and you have Kaleka’s recipe for success that grows with each new exhibition.
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