Sweet Unease

Artist: Ranbir Kaleka
Discussant: Nancy Adajania
In collaboration with Volte Gallery, Mumbai

February 11, 2011 | 6.30 pm
Volte Gallery, Mumbai

Ranbir Kaleka’s works have achieved significant international saliency during the last decade: they have been exhibited in museum, biennial, foundation and gallery contexts in Venice, Berlin, Lisbon, Vienna, New York, Mexico City and Sydney, among other centres. Born in 1953, in Patiala, Kaleka was educated at the Punjab University, Chandigarh, and the Royal College of Art, London; he has lived and worked both in Britain and India. Across the three decades of his artistic activity, he has produced both a remarkable body of paintings, vibrant with phantasmagoria and epic disquiet, as well as a body of trans-media works that combine conceptualist sophistication with a calibrated opulence of image. It is particularly unfortunate, then, that the Bombay art audience remains substantially unfamiliar with the contribution of this major contemporary artist; his works have been seen far too infrequently in this city. ‘Sweet Unease’ is a bold attempt to redress this lacuna. It is Kaleka’s first solo exhibition in Bombay, and constitutes a major survey of a decade of his trans-media activity. The earliest works shown here date back to the early 2000s; the latest were realised especially for this occasion.
(Excerpts from the catalogue essay by Ranjit Hoskote, Sweet Unease, Volte, Mumbai, 2011)

Nancy Adajania is a cultural theorist, art critic and independent curator, based in Bombay. She has written and lectured extensively on extended sculpture, new media and public art (including at Documenta 11, Kassel; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin; Kuenstlerhaus Vienna; Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon; and The Danish Contemporary Art Foundation, Copenhagen). She is research scholar at BAK basis voor aktuele kunst, Utrecht (2010-2011). She is co-author, with Ranjit Hoskote, of ‘The Dialogues Series’, a series of conversations with artists (Foundation B&G, 2011).